Long-term Effects of Parent Incarceration on Children

Date: 9:38 am | Placed in Articles, Parental Guide |

A variety of long-term effects of parental incarceration on children have been identified. The long-term impact varies with a variety of factors, including the developmental level of the child.

Incarceration and infants. A small number of women (6%, U.S. Department of Justice, 1994) are pregnant at the time of their incarceration, but few prisons in the United States permit mother to keep their infants with them during incarceration (Gabel & Girard, 1995). In most cases, mothers of newborn infants are permitted only a few days of contact before they must relinquish their infant and return to prison. As a result, there is little opportunity for the mother to develop a bond to the baby or for the baby to become familiar with the mother and form an attachment to her — a critical developmental task for both mothers and infants. As Myers et al. (1999) note, after the mother’s is released, she comes home to an infant or young child with whom she has not developed an emotional bond and who is not attached to her, with the likely result that the children will have emotional and behavioral problems.

Incarceration and young children.
Even if a child-parent attachment bond has already developed, as in the case of infants who have been in their mother’s or father’s care for the first 9 to 12 months of life, the disruption associated with parental incarceration will likely adversely affect the quality of the child’s attachment to their parent (see Thompson, 1998, for a general discussion of the effects of separation on attachment in non-incarcerated samples).

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). 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). In light of the results of this research on separation and attachment, it is not surprising that when their parents are incarcerated, young children (ages 2 – 6 years) have been observed to suffer a variety of adverse outcomes that are consistent with the research on the effects of insecure attachments (Johnson, 1995).

In fact, according to one estimate (Baunach, 1985), 70% of young children with incarcerated mothers had emotional or psychological problems. Children exhibit internalizing problems, such as anxiety, withdrawal, hypervigilance, depression, shame and guilt (Bloom & Steinhart, 1993; Dressler et al., 1992). They exhibit somatic problems such as eating disorders. And, perhaps most clearly, young children exhibit externalizing behaviors such as anger, aggression, and hostility toward caregivers and siblings (Fishman, 1983; Gaudin, 1984; Johnston, 1995; Jose-Kampfner, 1995; Sack et al. , 1976).

Incarceration and school-age children.
School-age children of incarcerated parents exhibit school-related problems and problems with peer relationships. Sack et al. (1976) reported that over 50% of the children of incarcerated parents had school problems, such as poor grades or instances of aggression, albeit many of these problems were temporary.

Among the younger children (6-8 years old) in the Sack et al. (1987) study, 16% exhibited transient school phobias and were unwilling to go to school for a 4-6week period after their parent’s incarceration. In another report, Stanton (1980) found even higher rates of school problems: 70% of 166 children of incarcerated mothers showed poor academic performance and 5% exhibited classroom behavior problems.

Another school-based problem is that children are sometimes teased or ostracized by other children as a result of their parent’s incarceration (Jose-Kampfner, 1991). As Reid and Eddy (this volume) note, as children reach adolescence, suspension and dropout rates are higher for these children (Trice, 1997). Effects of incarceration on boys versus girls.

Although it would be expected that boys would be more adversely affected by this stressful separation — in light of evidence that boys are more vulnerable to stressful changes than girlsare, in general (e.g., Hetherington et al., 1998), the evidence on this issue is unclear. Instead, the most likely scenario is that both boys and girls are adversely affected by parental incarceration, but their modes of expressing their reactions differ. Boys are more likely to exhibit externalizing behavior problems, while girls are more likely to display internalizing problems (Cowan et al., 1994; Cummings, Davies, & Campbell, 2000).

What leads to these problems?
The answer to this question is not simple. There are a number of interpretative problems that merit elaboration. First, incarceration is often preceded by a period of familial instability, poverty, child abuse or neglect, marital discord and conflict, or father absence. A combination of these conditions may have already increased the base rates of children’s problem behaviors.

Consequently, without measures of the child’s environment and behavior prior to incarceration, it is difficult to attribute the problem behaviors to incarceration per se. Other events also transpire at the time of incarceration that could account for some of the negative effects on children. Re-location and placement with alternative caregivers are both major disruptions in the children’s lives, which past research has shown to be detrimental to children (Rutter, 1987).

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).

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Long-term Effects of Parent Incarceration on Children

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