impact of parental incarceration on child development

The first set of factors consists of positive individual attributes. Improvements in parenting practices, we expect, will result in improvements in children's adjustment to their parents' incarceration and reentry. Only mothers who are eligible for release within 18 months can participate in the program, which also provides parenting and child development classes. Investigations of the patterns of visitation reveal that approximately half of incarcerated parents do not receive any visits from their children (Snell, 1994). The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act mandates termination of parental rights if a child has been in foster care for more than 15 of the last 22 months (Genty, 1998). A second visitation program is the Sesame Street program (Fishman, 1983). If recidivism can be reduced, children will be spared the trauma of repeated separation, which, in turn, will improve their psychological adjustment. Educational programs vary in their samples, their assessment methods, and their training strategies. According to Turney and Goodsell (2018): “children with incarcerated parents, and particularly those with incarcerated fathers, have trouble progressing through school” (p. 151). Providing children of incarcerated parents with the appropriate medical and mental health resources is essential to leading a healthy life. Moreover, misconduct reports for these women while they were in prison decreased, relative to rates observed prior to entry into the program, and recidivism rates after they were released were lower. A variety of problems characterize research in this area. To the extent that the child has already established close emotional relationships with the extended family, the trauma of transition to grandmother care will be lessened (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993). Inmate fathers in the control group did not show any significant changes. Incarceration and infants. In addition to the problems faced by the parent, such as finding a job and housing and re-integrating into the community, the child and parent face the formidable task of re-establishing their relationship. Explore, If you have a story to tell, knowledge to share, or a perspective to offer — welcome home. In addition, Crnic, Greenberg, Ragozin, Robinson, and Basham (1983) reported that mothers with higher levels of informal social support were more responsive and affectionate with their infants. The importance of focusing on the family unit stems from claims that post-release success is higher among inmates who have maintained family ties during incarceration (Clements, 1986; Hairston, 1987). However, the success of parent training programs with non-incarcerated parents in modifying parent-child interaction patterns and parental behavior and, in turn, improving children's adjustment, suggests that it is worthwhile to continue to develop parent educational intervention for incarcerated samples as well. In the case of incarceration, it should be recognized that any attempt to attribute effects on children to parental incarceration alone may be doomed to failure, because many events before, during, and after the incarceration co-occur and contribute to child outcomes. Cumulative risk models.Cumulative risk models A closely related theoretical perspective with clear relevance to the issue of the effects of incarceration on children is the cumulative risk perspective (Rutter, 1987; Sameroff et al., 1998). Evaluations indicate that the GSBB program increases the frequency of daughter-mother visitation and improves the quality of the visits and the mother-daughter relationship. Support for the effectiveness of parent education for inmate fathers comes from one recent study by Wilezck and Markstrom (1999). Evaluations of visitation programs underscore the benefits of these efforts. Even less drastic changes such as job loss, divorce, or residential re-location have been found to adversely affect the quality of the infant or toddler child-parent attachment quality (Thompson, Lamb, & Estes, 1982; Vaughn et al., 1979). Deception took a variety of forms, from total lies to strong shading of the truth, in which prison was referred to as an army camp, a hospital or a school. Second, although some research has suggested a negative association between maternal incarceration and child health, the evidence on this front is mixed. Specifically, mothers in either state (64%) or federal (84%) prisons were living with their children at the time of admission to prison. Instead, a framework that integrates these perspectives into a unified theoretical whole is necessary. There is controversy surrounding the wisdom of providing children with information concerning the arrest and the reasons for their parent's incarceration. Three sets of protective factors have been identified that appear to buffer the child from risk and stress and promote coping and good adjustment in the face of adversity. Many of these children were living with non-parental caregivers prior to the incarceration of their mother or father. Communication skills increased in all parents, and child management skills increased in two of the three families in the program, as evidenced by observations of parent-child interactions in the home. Incarceration is not a single or discrete event but a dynamic process that unfolds over time. In comparison to fathers in a control group, the fathers in the 10-week training program scored significantly higher on both their acceptance of their children and their empathic behavior toward their children. In terms of education, most did not have a high school diploma (7% in state prison; 6% in federal prison), but nearly 30% had obtained a GED. In 1991, 57% of prisoners had minor children; in 2000, 56% were in the same situation. Both the inmate father and his wife attended eight weekly classes. Grandmothers serve as gatekeepers in terms of their children's access to the parents just as divorced mothers regulate fathers' access to their children (Braver, 2000). This work underscores the need to assess the quality of children's attachment relationships with alternative caregivers such as grandparents when the parent is unavailable due to incarceration. In a preliminary evaluation of 11 women, Carlson (1998) found that 8 of them felt that the program increased mother-child bonding and all of them felt that the parenting classes improved their parenting skills. Visiting can calm children's fears about their parent's welfare as well as their concerns about the parent's feelings for them (Sack, 1977). The arrest phase. Children suffer stigma when a parent is incarcerated. Unfortunately, however, many parents who end up in prison are limited in their parenting abilities, and thus this potential protective factor is unavailable to their children (Johnston, 1991). (1987) study, 16% exhibited transient school phobias and were unwilling to go to school for a 4-6week period after their parent's incarceration. The impact of parental imprisonment on children can be profound and long-lasting. Another predictor or how well the child adjusts to parental incarceration is likely to be the quality of relationships with the extended family and non-family informal social networks This support is especially relevant when the father is incarcerated and leaves the mother to cope as a single parent. Others argue that the emotional distress of children is exacerbated by the unwillingness of family, friends or caregivers to discuss their parent's incarceration (Snyder-Joy & Carlo, 1998). Although the situation of a parent lost through death is more extreme, some of the insights gained from this literature concerning ways of helping children cope with loss is instructive. A similar set of interpretative problems has plagued the literature on the effects of other kinds of stress, such as divorce on children's functioning (Hetherington & Kelley, 2002; Hetherington et al., 1998). Moreover, the nature of the particular risk may be less critical than the number of risks that the child encounters. The final set of factors involves people outside the family, in the school system, peer groups, or churches, who support children's and parents' coping efforts. According to Turney and Goodsell (2018) children of incarcerated parents were more likely to have “asthma, obesity, with a later risk of high cholesterol, migraines, HIV/AIDS, overall fair/poor health” (p. 152). In many states, fragmented services and agencies result in service gaps, unmet needs, and overlapping or conflicting service delivery agendas (Phillips & Bloom, 1998). By educating the wider community about the needs of incarcerated parents, their children, and their families, more humane policies may emerge and the difficulties faced by these individuals will be better appreciated. Similarly in a much larger study carried out in England, Morris (1965) reported that 38% of the families used partial or total deception in explaining a parent's incarceration to the children. Many researchers have asserted that the effects of parental incarceration are not identical across all youth populations. Further work is needed to disentangle which of the multiple program components, such as increased visitation, involvement in organized activities, new friendships, or exposure to non-parental adult mentors, were responsible for these positive outcomes. In their study, Springer et al. Sixth, research needs to move beyond simple descriptions of differences in children to explanations of processes in the individual, family, context, or culture that account for children's adjustment. Parental incarceration impacts major parts of a child’s life and has a lifelong impact. In recognition of the difficulty of this type of prospective approach, careful retrospective interviews with the incarcerated parent, the child, and informed kin could begin to provide a profile of life in these families before incarceration. Moreover, kinship placements tend to be more stable and avoid transethnic discontinuities that are likely to occur in the foster care system. Insecure attachments  a consequence of adverse shifts in life circumstances  in turn, have been linked to a variety of child outcomes, including poorer peer relationships and diminished cognitive abilities (Sroufe, 1988). Finally, Bowlby's theory alerts us to the fact that mothers experience anxiety just as children do when the two are separated. Children who have easy temperaments and high self-esteem and who are intelligent and independent are more adaptable in the face of stressful life experience (Rutter, 1987; Werner, 1993). However, children of prisoners are more likely to have negative reactions to the experience when they cannot talk about it.". The long-term impact varies with a variety of factors, including the developmental level of the child. Over the last several decades, there are a number of secular changes that could affect families' reactions to incarceration.

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