Short-term Effects of Parent Incarceration on Children

Date: 9:35 am | Placed in Articles, Parental Guide |

The arrest phase. Unfortunately, only an incomplete picture of the impact of the initial arrest on children is available. According to Johnson (1991), one in five children is present at the time of the arrest and witnesses the mother being taken away by authorities. More than half of the children who witness this traumatic event are under 7 years of age and in the sole care of their mother. Jose-Kampfner (1995) interviewed 30 children who witnessed their mother’s arrest and reported that these children suffered nightmares and flashbacks to the arrest incident. Children in middle childhood who are in school at the time of the arrest may return to an empty residence and be unaware of the arrest of their mother (Fishman, 1983). The impact of father’s versus mother’s arrest is unknown and needs to be assessed in future research.

The management of the explanation. There is controversy surrounding the wisdom of providing children with information concerning the arrest and the reasons for their parent’s incarceration.

Some argue that children ought to be protected from the knowledge that their parents are incarcerated as a way of minimizing the trauma associated with the separation (Becker & Margolin, 1967). 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). This failure to disclose has been variously termed the “conspiracy of silence” (Jose-Kampfner, 1995) or “forced silence” (Johnson, 1995). Mothers are usually the ones who take responsibility for explaining the situation to the children — regardless of whether or not they are the incarcerated parent. For example, Sack, Seidler and Thomas (1976) found that in only 7 of 31 cases did the father or both parents together offer the child an explanation.

Moreover, when explanations were provided, they were often vague and general; one typical mother told her children that their father “did wrong and had to be punished.” Other explanations were distorted or deceitful. 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. Total deception occurred in 4 of the 31 families in the study, and partial deception occurred in another 6 families. In other words, nearly a third of the families engaged in some form of deception. 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.

What is the impact of this “conspiracy of silence” or deception on children? In light of the literature on children’s coping (Ayers, Sandler, West, & Roosa, 1996; Compas, 1987), which suggests that uncertainty and lack of information undermines children’s ability to cope, it is not surprising that children who are uninformed about their parent’s incarceration are more anxious and fearful (Johnson, 1995). 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. As Nolen- Hoeksema and Larson (1999) argue, children need honest, factual information, and they need to have their experience validated. Providing children with reliable, dependable information allows them to begin to make sense of their situation and begin the dual processes of grieving the loss of their parent and coping with their new life circumstances. On the other hand, silence about the parental incarceration often results not from a deliberate attempt to deceive the children but from an effort to avoid other complications.

As Johnson (1995, p. 74) notes “There may be a very good reason for such a forced silence; family jobs, welfare payments, child custody, and even housing may be jeopardized when others become aware of the parents’ whereabouts. However, children of prisoners are more likely to have negative reactions to the experiencewhen they cannot talk about it.”

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Short-term Effects of Parent Incarceration on Children

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