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Abstract

Children with incarcerated parents, and mothers in particular, are at increased risk for academic failure and school dropout. In two studies, we examined teachers' experiences with children with incarcerated parents and their expectations for competence of children with incarcerated mothers. In Study 1, a descriptive, qualitative study, teachers (N=30) discussed their experiences with children with incarcerated parents. The results of Study 1 suggest that children with incarcerated parents experience stigmatization in the school setting and children with incarcerated mothers are considered especially at risk. Based on the results of Study 1, we designed an experiment for Study 2 to examine teachers' (N=73) expectations for competency of fictitious children new to class because of maternal incarceration. Teachers randomly assigned to a scenario describing a female student whose mother is away at prison rated the child as less competent than teachers randomly assigned to scenarios in which the child's mother was described as being away for other reasons.

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... Prior research has documented that the stigma of parental incarceration shapes teachers' expectations for children with incarcerated parents. In a qualitative study of classroom teachers, Dallaire and colleagues found that teachers have witnessed, and in some cases come to expect, greater emotional and behavioral issues among children of incarcerated parents, thereby conferring academic disadvantage [13]. that classroom teachers rated fictional children with an incarcerated mother as less competent than their peers whose parents were not incarcerated [13]. ...
... In a qualitative study of classroom teachers, Dallaire and colleagues found that teachers have witnessed, and in some cases come to expect, greater emotional and behavioral issues among children of incarcerated parents, thereby conferring academic disadvantage [13]. that classroom teachers rated fictional children with an incarcerated mother as less competent than their peers whose parents were not incarcerated [13]. Similarly, Wildeman and colleagues' experimental research found that teachers rated a fictional student whose father was incarcerated as having 10-40 % more behavior problems than unaffected peers [14]. ...
... Participants (N = 391, n = 238 physicians and n = 153 nurses; overall response rate = 6.1 %) were presented with a hypothetical vignette about a 10 year-old male child presenting for care in the provider's office (Appendix A). The vignette, which was designed based on prior studies in the school setting [13,14], included basic social and health information about the fictional child (e.g. asthma, favorite subjects in school, favorite sports team). ...
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Purpose: To understand health care providers' perceptions, clinical considerations, and clinical actions towards children with incarcerated parents. Methods: We implemented an experimental vignette study in which health care provider participants were randomly assigned a patient case describing a child with a parent absent for unspecified reasons (control) vs. incarceration (experimental). Participants completed a survey of closed- and open-ended items regarding their clinical approach. Groups were compared with chi-square and ANOVA. Qualitative data were analyzed inductively. Results: Medical providers (N = 391) were predominantly non-Hispanic white, male, and physicians who had not received training on social determinants of health. There were no significant differences between the experimental and control groups in comfort with, or approach towards the patient; specific conditions of concern; or number of concerns. Across groups, providers commonly endorsed intentions for additional emotional-behavioral screening and concerns for ADHD and adjustment disorders. Providers responding to the experimental vignette indicated interest in the child's psychosocial context (e.g., behavior/attention at home), current experiences (e.g., with trauma or abuse), relationships (e.g., with grandparents), perspectives of other reporters (e.g., teachers), and additional clinical actions (e.g., in-depth medical or developmental history). Conclusion: Medical providers' approach to children of incarcerated parents may be similar to that of any child with an absentee parent, contrasting existing literature on teachers. When signaled about parental incarceration, providers evidenced attention to children's holistic contexts and needs.
... As highlighted in Extracts 5 and 6, a conversation now replaces "yes and no answers", and this has not only aided the parent-child relationship, but has also extended beyond that to facilitate positive relationships with partners and family. According to Dallaire, Ciccone & Wilson (2010), it is crucial for children to feel they can still have contact with their father when he goes to prison. They add that their study found that more letters between children and parents in prison reduced depression and somatic disorders in children. ...
... The program also helped men reconstrue their fathering role and engage in ways of doing active fathering. According to Dallaire, Ciccone, and Wilson (2010), it is crucial for children to feel they can still have contact with their father when he goes to prison. They add that their study found that more letters between children and parents in prison reduced depression and somatic disorders in children. ...
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Children may experience multiple adverse outcomes when a parent is incarcerated, and many incarcerated fathers experience parental stress. High parental stress negatively impacts wellbeing, parenting quality and prison adjustment. Despite evidence that maintaining parent-child relationships and fostering positive fathering identities can support desistance, understanding of these mechanisms remains limited, and more research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions which address these challenges in prison settings. This mixed-methods study aimed to evaluate Fathers Inside, a program aimed at developing positive fathering roles in prison. Twenty-seven fathers took part in the program, delivered in a UK prison. Their parental stress, wellbeing, judgmental attitudes, personal growth, locus of control, and self-esteem were measured before and after program participation. Pre- and post-program scores, and the Reliable Change Index were used to examine differences. While post-program scores showed no significant difference for any measures, on an individual level, several participants showed reliable change and clinical improvements using Reliable Change Index. Additionally, between 45 and 85% of participants’ scores were already comparable to the general population before commencement. Emerging themes in interviews included the reconfiguration of fatherhood roles from prison, allowing fathers to adapt to parenting at a distance, reframing fathering roles, accepting past mistakes, developing honesty as a value, and improving authentic communication with their children. The Fathers Inside program has the potential to help individuals reconstrue their fathering role in prison, reduce parental stress, thereby increasing adjustment to prison, and improve the parent-child relationship through authentic communication.
... With the United States seeing a remarkable number of children affected by parental incarceration, more attention has been given to examining the collateral consequences of imprisonment for future generations. Scholars have found that parental incarceration is associated with child well-being harms across many realms, including physical and mental health, academic achievement, and behavioral problems (Dallaire, Ciccone, and Wilson 2010;Foster and Hagan 2013;Haskins 2015;Kjellstrand, Yu, and Eddy 2019;Parke and Clarke-Stewart 2003;Phillips et al. 2002;Poehlmann 2005;Turney 2017;Zhang and Emory 2015). Almost 70% of women in prison are mothers with children under 18 years of age, and nearly one-third with children under the age of five (McGee et al. 2015(McGee et al. , 2017, leading scholars to question whether having a mother imprisoned (compared to a father) is more harmful to families and communities. ...
... Even though maternal incarceration occurs at a lower frequency than paternal incarceration, the above suggests that a mother's imprisonment is potentially more troublesome to the lives of children. Subsequently, more researchers are studying the consequences of maternal incarceration on children (e.g., Bradshaw, Creaven, and Muldoon 2021;Cho 2011;Dallaire et al. 2010;Foster and Hagan 2013;Huebner and Gustafson 2007;Poehlmann-Tynan and Turney 2021;Thomson et al. 2018;Turney & Wildeman 2015;Zhao et al. 2020). Nonetheless, findings from this work are inconclusive and suggest that there is still much to be learned concerning the factors linked to variation in child well-being and associations between maternal incarceration and child outcomes (Murray and Farrington 2008). ...
... Indeed, both classical and contemporary sociological research finds that the criminal legal system is stigmatizing as it can separate an individual from others in society and instill negative characteristics to a person that harms that person's identity and status (Goffman, 1963;Link & Phelan, 2001;Schnittker & Bacak, 2013). Prior research highlights how stigma stemming from criminal legal contact operates across families (e.g., Braman, 2004), peers (e.g., Jacobsen et al., 2021), the educational system (e.g., Dallaire et al., 2010), and the labor market (e.g., Pager, 2003). Furthermore, stigma is often posited as a pathway through which police contact compromises youth wellbeing (e.g., Testa et al., 2022). ...
... Stigma is a commonly hypothesized mechanism linking criminal legal contact to damaging outcomes. Though the focus of much research has been on arrests (Stewart & Uggen, 2020;Uggen et al., 2014) and incarceration (Braman, 2004;Dallaire et al., 2010;Feingold, 2021;Massoglia et al., 2011;Pager, 2003;Schnittker & John, 2007), police contact that does not lead to arrest or incarceration can also be stigmatizing, especially for youth (DeVylder et al., 2020;Jackson et al., 2019). First, police contact is a negative event that youth internalize (Brunson & Weitzer, 2009). ...
Article
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Objective The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between mother–youth closeness and stigma stemming from police contact. Background Research increasingly indicates that stigma stemming from police–youth encounters links police contact to compromised outcomes among youth, though less is known about the correlates of stigma stemming from this criminal legal contact. Close mother–youth relationships, commonly understood to be protective for youth outcomes, may be one factor that buffers against stop‐related stigma, especially the anticipation of stigma. Method We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a sample of youth born in urban areas around the turn of the 21st century, to examine the relationship between mother–youth closeness and stop‐related stigma. Results We find that mother–youth closeness is negatively associated with stop‐related anticipated stigma but not stop‐related experienced stigma. We also find that the relationship between mother–youth closeness and stop‐related anticipated stigma is concentrated among youth experiencing a non‐intrusive stop. Conclusion Close mother–youth relationships may protect against stigma stemming from criminal legal contact.
... Some have shown that courtesy stigma transfers from incarcerated parents to children. School-aged children with an incarcerated father (Wildeman et al., 2017) or mother (Dallaire et al., 2010) are viewed by teachers as having behavioral, social, and academic deficits compared to children whose parents are also absent but not incarcerated (e.g., the parent was away at school). ...
Article
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Objectives Test whether support for a small business is lower when started by prisoners or mothers of prisoners compared to local residents or people who identify as LGBTQ. Methods We conducted a vignette experiment using a hypothetical social media post for a new business followed by closed- and open-ended questions using a national YouGov sample (N = 1300). Results Support for the business is lower when founded by mothers of prisoners than former prisoners (or “local residents”), but lowest when founded by people who identify as LGBTQ. Open-ended responses suggest a lack of awareness of collateral consequences for families of people in prison. Explanations consistent with courtesy stigma were also present. Conclusions Given the public’s growing awareness of the benefits of successful reintegration and their willingness to support second chances, more education on the collateral harms of mass incarceration on families could assist with reinvestment in these communities.
... Children's experiences at school and other settings in which they spend significant portions of their time also likely provide important clues regarding the complex relations between parental incarceration, manifestations of racism, and externalizing behaviors. Data from experimental vignette studies indicate that teachers expect more behavior problems (Wildeman et al., 2017) and fewer competencies (Dallaire et al., 2010) from children they believe have incarcerated parents than children who are separated from parents for other reasons. Stigma related to parental incarceration may affect not only teachers' expectations, but also their behavior -including disciplinary referrals and behavior reports to parents. ...
Article
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Parental incarceration is an adverse childhood experience that inequitably burdens families of color and affects millions of U.S. children and adolescents. Although racialized disparities in exposure to parental incarceration are often acknowledged, researchers have yet to examine whether manifestations of racism may affect the link between parental incarceration and youth outcomes. This study provides a first look at how parental incarceration relates to health vulnerabilities in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, an ongoing, population-based study of U.S. children born between 2006 and 2008. We start by describing exposure to parental incarceration and then examine how parental incarceration, state-level racial prejudice, and discrimination relate to health risks among 9191 White (66%), Black (19%), or Hispanic (15%) youth. Consistent with what we know about pervasive racialized disparities in the U.S. criminal legal system, we find that 19.3% of Black children in our sample have experienced parental incarceration, followed by 7.8% of Hispanic children, and 4.8% of White children. Results of multilevel mixed models further indicate that parental incarceration was associated with increased health risks among White children whereas family economic hardship and discrimination experiences were more robustly associated with health vulnerabilities among Black and Hispanic children. Additional analyses explored whether parental incarceration was associated with other outcomes among Black and Hispanic children, revealing increased risk for behavior problems contingent upon parental incarceration and discrimination for Black children and Hispanic boys. Among Hispanic girls, parental incarceration was associated with increased risk of behavior problems in states with higher levels of racism. Results suggest that parental incarceration contributes to risk among early adolescents across racialized groups, but that the specific toll it takes depends on outcomes assessed and the context in which it occurs.
... School engagement is an important factor in improving "low levels of academic achievement, high levels of student boredom and disaffection, and high dropout rates in urban areas" (Fredricks et al., 2004, p. 59). Research shows an association between parental incarceration and academic outcomes, with CPGI more likely to experience suspension, failing grades, and low school engagement outcomes (Miller & Barnes, 2015;Nichols & Loper, 2012;Wildeman et al., 2018), which may be explained by school connectedness issues: social and relational challenges associated with incarceration stigma (Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008;Nichols et al., 2016); peer bullying and harassment (Allard & Greene, 2011); and teachers' lower expectations of CPGI with maternal incarceration (Dallaire et al., 2010). Other pathways also impact CPGI's school engagement, such as social networks built of friends who are less socially engaged, have lower GPAs, and who are more likely to engage in skipping school and fighting (Cochran et al., 2018). ...
Article
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Guided by the recidivism reduction principle, earlier research interest in children with parents or guardians who have experienced incarceration (CPGI) relies on a risk-focused model, collapsing our understanding of these children’s lives into one dimension: their parents’ or guardians’ imprisonment. Within this landscape, the present study seeks to deepen our understanding of the inherent heterogeneity of this population while adding social context, such as neighborhood characteristics, to the mix of possible protective and risk factors to inform interventions. We examined associations between school engagement and neighborhood characteristics, grouped into built social infrastructure and social support among CPGI. These associations were then tested in three groups: CPGI with (a) at least 4 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), (b) 2–3 ACEs, including PGI, and (c) only PGI as an ACE. Results indicate that sidewalks and a higher count of neighborhood amenities are associated with increased care about doing well in school. Higher count of detracting elements is associated with increased care about doing well in school in group A. We also observed a complementary relationship between built social infrastructure and social support factors, as they are associated with care about doing well at school and completing homework differently. Social capital and living in a supportive neighborhood are associated with both increased care about school and likelihood of completing homework. Accordingly, neighborhood-based policies are recommended to meet the needs of CPGI and their families.
... Specifically, research has shown that the perception of a child of an incarcerated parent is generally negative, with many believing that the child will be involved in the criminal justice system themselves in the future (Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008). This negative perception is most prevalent in schools, where teachers stigmatize students who have incarcerated parents, often fictitiously describing the child's competency lower than similar peers (Dallaire et al., 2010). This stigmatization could increase the likelihood of a child's behavior being perceived as combative, potentially funneling the child into the school-to-prison pipeline (Barnes & Motz, 2018). ...
Article
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The current study examines the association between parental incarceration and the change in the number of arrests and number of months incarcerated across three life-course periods. Examining individuals’ involvement in the criminal justice system throughout the life-course is a well-documented area of research in criminology. However, limited research has examined how factors such as parental incarceration shape criminal justice involvement across different key life-course stages. To conduct the current study, we employed the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 (NLSY97) and used conditional piecewise latent growth models. The NLYS97 is a nationally representative dataset of individuals born in the United States between 1980 and 1984. We evaluated whether parental incarceration (before 16)—both paternal and maternal—influences within-individual changes in the number of arrests and months incarcerated between 17 and 25 years (late-adolescence), 26 and 30 years (early-adulthood), and 31 and 35 years (adulthood). The results show that parental incarceration differentially influences the change in the number of arrests and number of months incarcerated across the three life-course periods. Moreover, the magnitude and direction differ by the parent incarcerated and the race of the participant. The findings suggest that factors associated with parental incarceration might be associated with differential effects on criminal justice involvement across key life-course periods. To reduce the likelihood of CJS involvement as adolescents age into adulthood, interventions should be implemented to protect children from the social, economic, and health-related harms of having a parent go to prison.
... While family visits are virtually always associated with positive outcomes for prisoners, Poehlmann's (2005) research shows that visits to prisons can be associated with negative outcomes for children, particularly if the visits are not well support or not child friendly. Others have shown a variety of negative or challenging reactions by children in response to negative visits (Dallaire, Ciccone & Wilson, 2010). In my research, I found that children were strongly ambivalent about their prison visiting experiences to Ontario, reporting positive experiences with their parent but also fear, anger, confusion, and frustration about the conditions, processes, and treatment they experienced at the prison (Knudsen, 2017). ...
Conference Paper
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Thank you for the opportunity to submit this alternative report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, on the occasion of the 5/6 periodic review of Canada under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). I seek to bring the Committee’s attention to the issue of children of incarcerated parents in Canada. The rights of children of incarcerated parents are well established as an area of particular importance in child rights, both in Article 9 of the UNCRC and as evidenced by the Committee devoting the 2011 Day of Discussion to this topic. However parental incarceration remains poorly understood and largely neglected from a policy and service provision perspective in Canada. While the experiences, outcomes, and needs of these children and youth have begun to be recognized in other countries in recent years, Canadian children of prisoners remain largely ‘invisible.’ The following is a brief discussion of several child rights concerns related to parental incarceration that deserve attention and action by Canada, and a series of recommendations. I would be pleased to provide the Committee with any further information, on request.
... Children with incarcerated parents can experience stigma in the school setting and it appears children who experience maternal incarceration are at greater risk. In a study of 73 teachers, Dallaire et al., (2010) found teachers rated children with an incarcerated parent as less competent, thereby having lower expectations for them. 38 It is clear stigmatization may not only come from peers but from the trusted caregivers during a child's school day. ...
Article
T here are five million children in the United States who have been affected by the current or former incarceration of a parent. Although many of these children demonstrate resiliency to adverse life events, the disruption to the child-parent bond places these children at high risk for both externalizing and internalizing behaviors. Attachment strength with one's parent plays a large role in the development of a child's relationship with others throughout their life span; an attachment rupture, such as what can occur during a parent's incarceration, could pose long-term psychological effects for children that continue into their adult lives. Trying to foster prosocial bonds between incarcerated parents and their children mitigate these problems, providing an overall benefit to the child. Research results imply more friendly correctional-based visiting policies, parent management training opportunities, better access to transportation for correctional facility visits, individual and family interventions integrating CBT and more support-related services, especially in the school setting, can help children restore relationships with incarcerated parents, subsequently reducing their potential for emotional harm and at-risk behaviors.
... Our findings align with prior research emphasizing the emotional challenges children face following a parent's incarceration (Parke & Clarke-Stewart, 2003). Studies have also shown that these children experience stigmatization, academic difficulties and harsher sanctions for behavioural problems (Dallaire et al., 2010). Nguyen (2022) observed that children's books on parental incarceration often depict stigma, with children facing judgement, exclusion or negative reactions from peers and the community. ...
Article
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Research suggests that bibliotherapy can help children cope with life's challenges through age‐appropriate reading and storytelling. Bibliotherapy has been employed to assist children in dealing with grief, divorce, adoption and other stressors. However, limited studies have investigated how this approach can support young children with incarcerated parents. Utilizing bibliotherapy as a framework, this study conducts a thematic analysis of children's picture books published between 1977 and 2014, featuring children of incarcerated parents as main characters to better understand the challenges they face. The study aims to explore the challenges depicted among child characters in picture books addressing parental incarceration for a young reading audience over almost 50 years. Our findings reveal that child characters grapple with various emotional, psychological and social challenges related to the sudden separation from their loved ones. We discuss the implications of each finding in greater detail.
... Parental incarceration goes beyond just a discrete event, it is a process in the wake of other family life circumstances and incorporates the lived experiences prior to and after their parent's incarceration (e.g., family climate, parenting style, parent's problem behaviors; Giordano et al., 2019). The ongoing effects of parental incarceration can significantly impact the developmental stages of emerging adulthood, causing young adults to remain silent in their experiences, enduring cycles of trauma, encountering secondary stigma, experiencing social exclusion, navigating through behavioral challenges, and altering the way in which they achieve conventional goals and transition to adult statuses (Dallaire et al., 2010;Kjellstrand et al., 2018;Murray et al., 2012;Turney, 2018). Therefore, interpretations and emotional responses of parental incarceration goes beyond the specific event of imprisonment. ...
... To avoid stigmatization, children and their caregivers often conceal the incarceration of the parent to avoid the negative view societal members might impose upon them. Regardless, the stigmatization of incarceration can lead to an increase in behavioral issues (Hanlon, Blatchley, & Bennett-Sears 2005, as cited in Dallaire, Ciccone, & Wilson, 2010). In addition to their teachers' perceptions and THE PORTRAYALS OF CHILDREN OF INCARCERATED PARENTS expectations for this group of children, this risk factor, combined with those previously mentioned, present contributing factors for academic failure. ...
Article
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By using bibliotherapy, teachers, social workers, and juvenile justice personnel can help children with incarcerated parents develop a sense of resilience by finding themselves on the page of a book.
... Internalizing behaviors are processes/practices within the self, while externalizing behaviors are actions in the external world. Internalizing behaviors may include embarrassment, withdrawn behaviors, psychosomaticizing, emotional ambivalence, or other childhood trauma symptoms associated with the parent-child relationship and parental incarceration (i.e., limited phone and/or face-to-face interactions, or no interactions at all, which can contribute to a lack of understanding) (Aaron & Dallaire, 2010;Arditti & Savla, 2015;Dallaire et al., 2010;Martin, 2017;Turney, 2019). Some common post-traumatic reactions to parental incarceration may be reexperiencing, purposeful avoidance, dissociation (emotional shock), hyperarousal, and anxiety (Arditti & Savla, 2015). ...
Article
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PurposeParental incarceration is a traumatic experience that affects both the parent and their family. It is also a traumatic childhood and adolescent event that plagues students who may already be vulnerable and oppressed. The current study examines parental incarceration and associated factors.Methods African American students (N = 139) from a Texas Independent School District were assessed to determine associations between parental incarceration and socioeconomic status (free/reduced lunch), educational outcomes (being retained in a grade and/or special education placement) school exclusion (suspension and/or expulsion), and juvenile justice involvement (receipt of a criminal ticket in school, ticket in the community, and/or student arrest, and possible interactional effects. Chi-square and binomial logistic regression were used to examine these associations and the likelihood of experiencing these effects from parental incarceration.Results and Conclusion Findings revealed that parental incarceration was associated with low socioeconomics, being retained, school exclusion, and juvenile justice involvement in this population. Implications for continued research and practice are discussed.
Article
Individuals navigate through social expectations of designated roles across the different stages of childhood into emergent adulthood, and later in adulthood particularly as parents. Though roles and social expectations may shift as individuals age over time, gendered expectations may prevail in face of life-altering events. Through semi-structured interviews with three formerly incarcerated mothers and their four children, we provide in-depth case studies of mother–child experiences to comparatively explore how each group views their role and takes part in it during and after maternal incarceration. We found that social expectations of mothering trickle over onto the mothers’ children, particularly older girls and young women, as a means of compensating for mothers’ physical distance during incarceration and the socioeconomic setbacks that mothers experience after incarceration. Children’s experiences of maternal incarceration are shaped by the intersection of gender, age, and class as siblings support one another and their mothers in starting over and, vice versa, in the ways mothers try to start over based on where their children fall in these intersections.
Article
Objective Guided by intersectional feminism and symbolic interactionism, the purpose of this study was to document the untold stories of women with incarcerated spouses in India. Background When a family member is incarcerated, the task of emotionally and financially supporting the family often falls upon women, who are likely to be underresourced and overwhelmed. Women whose husbands are incarcerated in India are likely to possess multiple marginalized identities, increasing their vulnerability to intersecting forms of oppression. Empirical research is lacking on wives of incarcerated men in India, contributing to their invisibility in policy‐making and programmatic interventions. Method In‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 14 wives of prison inmates who resided in or around the capital city of Delhi, all of whom either held a lower caste identity or a Muslim religious identity. Transcribed interviews were analyzed following the steps of narrative analysis. Results Results illustrate the diversity of storied experiences of wives of incarcerated husbands in India. Participants' narratives represented three types of stories: Ambivalent but Hanging On , Unconditionally Devoted , and Independent and Disillusioned . Four overarching themes characterized women's experiences with spousal incarceration: gendered care work , being stigmatized and sexualized , staying in the marriage , and ceilings of aspiration . Conclusion This study renders visible women on the margins of Indian society, illustrating how they make meaning of extraordinary life circumstances and persevere through dire hardship.
Article
While the deleterious impacts of parental incarceration are well documented, we know less about the experiences of children with parents imprisoned by immigration authorities. We draw from 62 multigenerational and multiperspective interviews conducted in California with school-age children experiencing parental immigration imprisonment (PII), and their nondetained caregivers. We find that children experiencing PII report feelings and behaviors suggestive of significant psychological distress, which leads to changes in engagement and behavior at school. While some children access academic support and counseling, often following advocacy from nondetained parents or interventions by teachers, others do not receive such support. Many children conceal their family’s situation and withdraw from school-based programs—alarmingly, the very same structures that could support them through PII. These behaviors are rooted in compounded vulnerability, that is, children’s overlapping experiences of parents’ imprisonment and precarious immigration status. Our study provides strong descriptive evidence of the extensive harms of PII for children. These results should prompt immediate action from policymakers who can legislate an end to incarceration in immigration legal proceedings. Our findings can also inform efforts by educators and schools to better support children experiencing PII.
Article
The 2020 Juvenile Residential Facility Census reports that roughly 25,000 youth in the United States (U.S.) are incarcerated—placing the United States as the leading nation in number of juveniles in correctional facilities worldwide. This paper aims to highlight an overlooked population impacted by this issue: not the incarcerated youth themselves, but their siblings. This paper first grounds historical trends, the effects of racialized sociopolitical systems on disparate rates of incarceration, and the current state of youth incarceration, with a specific focus on impacts on families. This paper reviews the literature on how families are affected by the juvenile justice system in terms of their well‐being, education, and other outcomes—drawing from the small body of research directly on siblings and hypothesizing impacts in need of further study based on families' experiences in the criminal justice system. We present historical and current issues/limitations to understanding and addressing the impacts of youth incarceration on siblings, concluding with areas of future research needed to address the impacts that a youth's incarceration has on their siblings and family.
Article
This study examines the association between three forms of father–child contact during incarceration and fathers’ reports of parental self-efficacy. The study’s sample derives from (n = 1,720) fathers participating in the Multisite Family Study on Incarceration, Partnering, and Parenting (MFS-IP) study. Multivariate ordinary least squares regression models were conducted to examine the study’s hypotheses. Among the contact types, visits had a positive and significant effect on fathers’ views of their parental efficacy after controlling demographic, familial, and carceral characteristics. This study informs practice and policy, demonstrating that contact is essential to family-strengthening services and beneficial for incarcerated fathers and families. Importantly, efforts should be made to make it easier for fathers to have contact with their children.
Article
This study examines the association between three forms of father–child contact during incarceration and fathers’ reports of parental self-efficacy. The study’s sample derives from (n = 1,720) fathers participating in the Multisite Family Study on Incarceration, Partnering, and Parenting (MFS-IP) study. Multivariate ordinary least squares regression models were conducted to examine the study’s hypotheses. Among the contact types, visits had a positive and significant effect on fathers’ views of their parental efficacy after controlling demographic, familial, and carceral characteristics. This study informs practice and policy, demonstrating that contact is essential to family-strengthening services and beneficial for incarcerated fathers and families. Importantly, efforts should be made to make it easier for fathers to have contact with their children.
Article
The timing and structure of fertility have important implications for individuals and society. Families play a critical role in fertility; however, little is known about how parental incarceration shapes fertility despite it being a common experience in the life course of disadvantaged children. This study examines the consequences of parental incarceration for children's fertility using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. I employ multiple-decrement life tables and survival analyses to estimate the relationship between parental incarceration and fertility. Individuals who experience parental incarceration have different timing of fertility, with earlier first births and a quicker pace of subsequent births, as well as more nonmarital fertility, compared with those who do not experience parental incarceration. This analysis finds consistent evidence that parental incarceration is associated with the timing and structure of fertility and suggests that a parent's incarceration carries consequences over the life course of children. This study advances our understanding of how mass incarceration shapes American families, illustrates how the broader consequences of mass incarceration contribute to social inequality, and provides evidence that the enduring implications of incarceration span multiple generations.
Article
Incarcerated parents are at an increased risk of their parental rights being terminated due to the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The ASFA was passed with the intention of limiting the number of children trapped in the U.S. foster care system and is commonly known for shifting efforts from reunification to adoption.101 This act results in a swift and sudden termination of parental rights (TPR). The negative impact of this law on incarcerated parents is evident considering that in the years following the passage of the ASFA, the rate of TPR for incarcerated parents has increased by 250%.102 This piece aims to identify aspects of the ASFA which threaten incarcerated parents' ability to be reunited with their children after their prison sentence, along with elements of the prison system that prevent incarcerated parents from abiding by the regulations of the ASFA and maintaining contact with their children. The most detrimental aspect of the ASFA is the 15 of 22 Provision, which requires the state to file for termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for a consecutive 15 of the past 22 months.103 This regulation guarantees the TPR for any parent with a prison sentence longer than a year and a half during which a child is sent to foster care, resulting in the permanent severance of the parent-child relationship. In addition, strict timeline requirements of the ASFA relating to the child’s placements and hearings to discuss these placements make it challenging for incarcerated parents to fight for reunification. This issue is compounded by failures of the prison system, which prevent incarcerated parents from participating in their child’s placement process. Most proposed solutions suggest a full repeal of the ASFA, while others argue that a major reform of the ASFA is sufficient. The states of New York, Washington, and Colorado have already initiated this reform by creating exceptions to the 15 of 22 Provision, along with including other considerations and accommodations for incarcerated parents.104 The findings explored in this paper clearly indicate that incarcerated parents are at a disadvantage when trying to reunite with their children. Their parental rights are terminated at an unjust rate due to the strict requirements of the ASFA: a law that fails to acknowledge the circumstances of incarcerated parents and instead strips their parental rights away
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the experiences of immigrant families accessing special education in the United States while highlighting the critical role of culture in special education. The authors discuss legal underpinnings protecting families' access to special education processes, the diverse composition of the United States, and cultural beliefs and lenses that may influence how families engage in special education processes. The authors highlight the importance of directly supporting special education professionals in developing and practicing cultural humility, especially when engaging with from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The chapter closes with recommendations for practice and implications for future research.
Chapter
Children with incarcerated mothers have been identified as one of the most vulnerable and at risk populations in the United States. They are particularly vulnerable to poor outcomes as their mother's incarceration exacerbates the level of risk often acknowledged for all children of incarcerated parents. Maternal incarceration is a unique and intensifying risk factor as mothers are more likely than fathers to be children's primary parent and more likely to be economically disadvantaged before, during, and after incarceration. When fathers are incarcerated, children usually remain with their mothers. When mothers are incarcerated, children are separated from their mother and child‐rearing responsibilities are transferred to an alternative parent, most often a grandmother. Impacts of maternal incarceration include attachment disruption, family structure disruption and reorganization, caregiver stress, and financial strain. Recent research finds impacts from maternal incarceration – such as a multigenerational crime and incarceration effect, damaged mother–child attachment, mental health issues, diminished school performance, and delinquent behavior – to be more powerful than the impacts of paternal incarceration.
Article
Parental incarceration has been associated with educational disadvantages for children, such as lower educational attainment, increased grade retention, and truancy and suspensions. However, children exposed to parental incarceration often experience other adversities that are also associated with educational disadvantage; the contribution of these co-occurring adversities has not been considered in previous research. This study aimed to investigate the educational outcomes of children exposed to (a) maternal incarceration alone and (b) maternal incarceration plus other adversities (i.e., maternal mental illness and/or child protective services [CPS] contact). We used linked administrative data for a sample of children whose mothers were incarcerated during the children's childhood (i.e., from the time of mother's pregnancy through the child's 18th birthday; n = 3828) and a comparison group of children whose mothers had not been incarcerated (n = 9570). Multivariate multinomial logistic regressions examined the association between exposure to the three adversities (i.e., maternal incarceration, maternal mental illness, and child CPS contact) and above or below average reading and numeracy attainment in Grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. At all grade levels, children exposed to maternal incarceration alone and those exposed to maternal incarceration plus other adversities had increased odds of below average numeracy and reading attainment and decreased odds of above average numeracy and reading attainment compared to children without any of the recorded exposures. Children exposed to maternal incarceration and CPS contact and those exposed to all three adversities had increased odds of below average reading and numeracy attainment compared to children exposed to maternal incarceration alone. The findings highlight the complex needs of children of incarcerated mothers that must be considered when designing and delivering educational support programs. These children would benefit from the implementation of multi-tiered, trauma-informed educational and clinical services.
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Based on recent studies, it could be indicated that more than 10.9 million prisoners are imprisoned throughout the world. In other words, it could be said that the prison population has been increasing from year to year. In Malaysia, the National Prison Administration reported in 2021 a total of 68 603 prisoners were reported and half of them are aged between 30 years old to 45 years old. These figures indicated that many of the imprisoned people have families and partners outside. Many pieces of research were reported on prisoners but minority research was done on prisoners' wives. This study discovers the implications of imprisonment of husbands towards their wives. A qualitative approach was implemented in this study by having fifteen in-depth interviews. The findings propose that the wives of prisoners are impacted not just by the tag of being the wife of a prisoner, but mostly by the selfishness of their husbands concerning the emotions and destitutions the women experience after the imprisonment of their husbands.
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While there is a growing body of research on parent-child visitation among the general carceral population, less attention has been paid to examining parent-child contact practices among parents with mental health illness diagnoses. The current study uses a sample from the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates to analyze the associations between mental health illness diagnosis and various modalities of parent-child contact. Multivariate analyses of types of mental health illness diagnoses on six parent-child contact modalities demonstrate heterogeneity where not all mental health diagnoses reduce all parent-child contacts. Furthermore, incarcerated parents with multiple mental health illnesses are less likely to experience most forms of contact including in-person visits, phone calls, and mail.
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This chapter extensively explores two specific theories researched within CPNYC’s practice model, the conspiracy of silence and ambiguous loss, as they relate to losing a parent to the criminal justice system. The conspiracy of silence is the failure to disclose to a child that a family member is incarcerated, which includes the deception and shading of the truth commonly found in families affected by incarceration. Children are taught and encouraged to refer to prison or jail as army camp, a hospital, work, or school. This reinforces the shame associated with having a parent in prison and further complicates feelings of worry, anxiety, fear, anger, and dissociative responses to their parent’s absence.This chapter provides extensive discussion through case illustration and step-by-step disclosure processes with clinicians and families on how lifting the conspiracy of silence strengthens the child’s ability to cope and self-soothe. Ambiguous loss, defined as loss without closure, complicates the grieving process for children of incarcerated parents. This chapter also explores the implications of this theory on clinical practice and describes two common ambiguous loss types experienced by the children, both of which increase the internalization and externalizing of symptoms uniquely expressed and experienced by this population.KeywordsAbsence of presenceAmbiguous lossConspiracy of silenceDisenfranchised griefPathogenic secretPsychosocial stressorsSilence theorySurvivor silenceSymbolic lossTrauma story
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This chapter defines the concept of secondary incarceration within the primary trauma of parental incarceration. It will also explore how children exhibit the emotional effects of parental incarceration through complex trauma-related stress symptoms such as isolation, anxiety, poor attachment, inability to focus, sleep difficulties, substance use or dependence, and significant feelings of shame and secrecy. If unaddressed, the impacts of these symptoms often lead to long-term psychological and emotional malfunctioning (Miller and Barnes, Am J Crim Justice 40:765–784, 2015; Murray et al., Psychol Bull 138(2):175–210, 2012).Without intervention, 70% of these children will enter the juvenile and/or adult criminal justice system (Mumola, Incarcerated parents and their children. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). Many children affected by parental incarceration experience complex traumas made manifest by sustained and repeated traumatic experiences like racism, poverty, diminished social mobility, lack of access to resources, and low employability (Wildeman and Western, Incarceration in fragile families. The future of children, 157–177, 2010). Research further indicates that even prior to their parent’s incarceration, children experience elevated risk for trauma-symptom development and social marginalization (Wildeman and Western, Incarceration in fragile families. The future of children, 157–177, 2010). This chapter will also discuss the psychological, social, and emotional stressors faced by the single parent raising the children on their own and the implications of their own mental health and functioning on the child who has lost their parent to the criminal justice system.KeywordsComplex trauma-related stress symptomsDevelopmental traumaEmotional distressInvisible populationParent-child attachmentPrimary traumaSecondary incarcerationSecondary prisonizationVisitation experience
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Justice-involved families in India are underserved despite concurrent challenges including inadequate penal systems and widespread poverty. Families provide emotional and financial support to incarcerated individuals—burdens that fall upon female kin who are underresourced. Women experiencing spousal incarceration in India are likely to be from marginalized sections of society, vulnerable to co-occurring forms of oppression, making intersectional feminism a suitable theoretical framework to contextualize their lives. Through consistent interactions with the carceral institution, these women become integrated in the prison culture, experiencing secondary prisonization. Intersectional feminism helps understand variations in secondary prisonization for women inhabiting different social locations. However, this population remains understudied. We bridge the gap by building a contextualized understanding of this population using intersectional feminism, by attending to scholarship that illustrates sources of marginalization including exploitive informal work, a minoritized caste identity, and a minoritized religious identity. We offer recommendations for theory and research. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Family Theory & Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Council for Family Relations.
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Support in schools for children with a parent in prison
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Parental incarceration is a significant, inequitably distributed form of adversity that affects millions of US children and increases their risk for emotional and behavioral problems. An emerging body of research also indicates, however, that children exhibit resilience in the context of parental incarceration. In this article, we review evidence regarding the adverse implications of parental incarceration for children's adjustment and consider factors that account for these consequences with special attention to naturally occurring processes and interventions that may mitigate risk and contribute to positive youth development. We also offer a critical reframing of resilience research and argue that (a) scholars should adopt more contextualized approaches to the study of resilience that are sensitive to intersecting inequalities and (b) resilience research and practice should be conceptualized as important complements to, rather than substitutes for, social and institutional change. We conclude by offering social justice–informed recommendations for future research and practice.
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Incarceration is a global phenomenon aimed at correcting the deviant individuals and punishing the criminals. Regardless of this fact, there is a certain group of people, the families of the incarcerated individuals, who become the unintended burden-bearers of those put behind bars and live completely shadowed lives. They face an array of social, financial, and emotional costs owing to the imprisonment of their loved ones and suffer, on various fronts, throughout their lives. The families bear the trauma, the agony, the stigma, the vulnerability, and what not. This chapter aims to assess the issues faced by an essential part of the family, that is, the children of the incarcerated individuals. It highlights the experiences of children, when one or both of their parents are incarcerated, discusses the changes in familial dynamics, norms, roles, and responsibilities as a result of it. The chapter emphasizes on the fact that the effects of incarceration resonate in all the domains of their children’s lives. The chapter is based on the interviews conducted with such children, who remain largely invisible in children-related policies and services and reviews certain studies based on children’s experiences of parental incarceration.
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Parental incarceration has negative effects on children’s educational outcomes. Past studies have only analyzed, and therefore only treated as consequential, parental incarceration that occurs during childhood rather than prenatally. Such analyses that emphasize the importance only of events that occur during one’s lifetime are common in life course studies. This paper introduces an “entwined life events” perspective, which argues that certain events are so consequential to multiple persons’ lives that they should be analyzed as events within multiple independent life courses; parental incarceration, whenever it occurs, is entwined across and shapes both parents’ and children’s lives. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we find that parental incarceration, both prenatal and during childhood, significantly influences children’s academic ability measures and years of completed schooling. Our results show heterogeneous effects by children’s race. We find that the absolute magnitude of parental incarceration effect estimates is largest for White children relative to estimates for Black and Hispanic children. At the same time, outcome levels tend to be poorer for Black and Hispanic children with parental incarceration experience. We explain this racial heterogeneity as confounded by the many other social disadvantages that non-White children encounter, resulting in the individual effect of parental incarceration not being extremely disruptive to their academic growth.
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This study is aimed to investigate how paternal incarceration moderates the genetic association with children’s educational attainment. Based on gene-environment interaction (G × E) models, we hypothesize that exposure to paternal incarceration, a critical source of health and social disadvantages, may reduce children’s genetic potential for educational attainment. To test the hypothesis, we conduct an analysis based on a whole-genome polygenic score for educational attainment using data from participants of European ancestry in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). To guard against false-positive findings due to passive gene-environment correlation, we replicated the analysis based on participants raised by a social (i.e., non-biological) father. We find that the association between the education polygenic score and educational attainment observed at Wave 5 is significantly lower among Add Health participants who experienced paternal incarceration than those who never experienced paternal incarceration. This study provides evidence that social and genetic factors jointly and interactively influence educational attainment. It demonstrates how developmental and life-course criminology can be integrated with socio-genomic research to improve our understanding of the consequences of criminal justice involvement.
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Mass incarceration has fundamental adverse effects that include weakening families and intimate relationships, altering children’s life chances, and undermining communities. Serious work on those effects began in the late 1990s and laid foundations on which subsequent research has built. More recent work, especially in the past dozen years, is more complex and has produced findings that are more nuanced and mixed. It is also theoretically and conceptually richer. The newer work involves substantially greater cross-disciplinary engagement, draws on new and more diverse data sources, and pays greater attention to pathways into prison. Fundamental challenges persist. They include measurement problems, overlap between the criminal justice and other governmental systems (e.g., education, public health, social welfare), and generalizability issues. Mixed results, definitional disagreements, and measurement challenges should encourage researchers to embrace complexity in the study of the effects of incarceration on family and community life.
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Children of incarcerated parents may have traumatic experiences that correlate with negative educational and mental health outcomes. School counselors are ideally suited to provide trauma-informed school counseling for children of incarcerated parents through individual, group, or classroom counseling interventions while also collaborating with stakeholders. This chapter provides school counselors an overview of the possible trauma of parental incarceration while describing approaches to help meet the needs of students. The authors describe the importance of collaborating with caregivers, administrators, school nurses, and teachers to help promote a positive school climate, offer support, and reduce the possible stigma connected to parental incarceration. The authors recommend advocacy practices and future research areas to continue to promote trauma-informed school counseling for children of incarcerated parents.
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This study examines the relationship between incarcerated parents and their children. A total of 110 participants in the “Reading for a Change” program at three Colorado correctional facilities were recruited. Using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, incarcerated parents were asked about their relationships with their children and the impact incarceration has had on their families. Results indicated considerable barriers to visits, high costs of keeping in touch, significant impacts on the family at home, strained financial support, and important reported changes in children's behavior.
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This chapter examines the parent-child bond when a parent is incarcerated in state or federal prison. The purpose is to prepare helping professionals to support children who wish to maintain relationships with their parents during prison sentences. The nature of the parent-child relationship is discussed, and practical strategies are proposed for helping parents to stay a part of their children's lives. Topics include visitation, video visits, phone calls, letter writing, emails, and parental participation in education. Logistics of these activities are discussed, and child-friendly activities are suggested to help prepare children for interacting with their parent within the context of the correctional system. Contraindications for such contact are also noted. The chapter concludes with recommendations for professional advocacy.
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One in fourteen children experience the incarceration of a parent only to be reunited upon release where risk for recidivism remains high—the implications of which for children’s well-being is not well understood. To fill this gap, the study uses data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting and Partnering to follow 543 justice-involved fathers 18-months post-release. Results suggest that stable reentry trajectories are associated with children’s decreased behavior problems, particularly for those who are non-residential. Boys and older children may be more negatively influenced by frequency of recidivism whereas girls and younger children may benefit more from longer durations of community time. Findings inform strategies that ease reintegration processes and improve well-being for children in justice-involved families.
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Low educational expectations for children placed in out-of-home care (OHC) are often proposed as a contributing factor to poor educational outcomes of children in OHC. However, very little empirical evidence exists on the association between educational expectations and educational outcomes of children in OHC, and the theoretical underpinnings of what drives a potential association are limited in the OHC literature. The purpose of this study is to contribute with theoretical and empirical knowledge about the relationship between educational expectations, individual characteristics and achievement of children in OHC. We propose a theoretical model of the relationship between expectations and achievement and empirically test fundamental parts of the model using path analysis on survey, academic and psychometric data on 132-139 Danish children in foster care. Our findings show that educational expectations of teachers and foster mothers do matter for the children’s academic performance in math, while only the foster mothers’ educational expectations matter for reading performance. Educational expectations impact educational performance both directly and indirectly through the mediation of child characteristics. Importantly, our findings also show that the formation of the expectations of teachers and foster mothers draw on child age and observations of the children’s abilities and functioning including their level of IQ and psychosocial adjustment. Hence, we argue, that raising educational expectations alone is an insufficient measure to increase the educational performance of children in OHC. Instead, we must work to find suitable interventions to overcome the excessive prevalence of developmental and learning problems among children in OHC
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Four meta-analyses were conducted to examine gender differences in personality in the literature (1958-1992) and in normative data for well-known personality inventories (1940-1992). Males were found to be more assertive and had slightly higher self-esteem than females. Females were higher than males in extraversion, anxiety, trust, and, especially, tender-mindedness (e.g., nurturance). There were no noteworthy sex differences in social anxiety, impulsiveness, activity, ideas (e.g., reflectiveness), locus of control, and orderliness. Gender differences in personality traits were generally constant across ages, years of data collection, educational levels, and nations.
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This study evaluates the assumption common to teacher education programs that, when preservice teachers’ subject matter knowledge is enhanced by a formal psychological understanding of learners and learning, superior instruction results. Preservice language arts teachers (N = 113) were asked to determine what they thought would constitute appropriate responses to a middle school student's request for feedback about his poem. The responses of the preservice teachers were such that formalist thinking predominated over instructional feedback intended to increase literary skills. The researchers argue that, if preservice teachers’ beliefs are hardy and often prove highly resistant to change, there is reason to be concerned with the educational perspectives that a formalistic understanding of psychology helps foster.
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Although it is clear that parental incarceration has adverse effects on children, there is limited information about effective services for helping this population. With an increase in the number of parents of minor children in jail, there is a need for schools to assist affected students in a structured and comprehensive manner. The purpose of this article is to describe a group intervention, recently piloted in Los Angeles County, that provides support to elementary children of incarcerated parents. An eight session framework is described. Prescreening issues, theoretical considerations, and leadership recommendations are also discussed.
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In order to effectively help children whose mothers become involved with the criminal justice system, it is important to understand their differing needs. To that end, the analyses described in this article explore the heterogeneity in parent and family risks among a group of children whose mothers had contact with the criminal justice system. Using data from an epidemiologic study of youth, results showed that the two most prevalent problems in the backgrounds of this group of youth were poverty (61.5%) and maternal mental health problems (54.9%). But, results of cluster analyses suggest this group is actually made up of four meaningfully different subgroups: (1) children with only isolated risks, (2) children with histories of abuse, (3) children who have multiple parents/caregivers with histories of drug abuse and/or mental health problems, and (4) children whose parents have few problems, but who are living in economically deprived, single-parent households.
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Examined differential expectancy effects as a function of teachers' susceptibility to biasing information and the distinction between positive ("Galatea") and negative ("Golem") outcomes of teacher expectancies. 26 biased and unbiased student teachers were identified on the basis of their susceptibility to biasing information in scoring drawings allegedly made by high- or low-status students. High-bias teachers treated the students they perceived to be of low potential negatively while at the same time treating randomly selected students in a manipulated high-expectancy group as favorably as they treated the students they themselves nominated as being of high potential. Unbiased teachers treated all 3 groups of students ( N = 202) equitably. The strongest and most consistent Golem effects were observed for behavioral manifestations of dogmatism. These patterns of differential negative expectancy effects were evident not only in teachers' behavior but also in students' actual performance of specially designed tasks. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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The authors examined predictors of teachers' ratings of academic competence of 105 kindergarten children from low-income families. Teachers rated target children's expected competence in literacy and math and completed questions about their perceptions of congruence-dissonance between themselves and the child's parents regarding education-related values. Independent examiners assessed children's literacy and math skills. Teachers' instructional styles were observed and rated along dimensions of curriculum-centered and student-centered practices. Controlling for children's skills and socioeconomic status, teachers rated children as less competent when they perceived value differences with parents. These patterns were stronger for teachers who exhibited curriculum-centered, rather than student-centered, practices. The findings suggest a mechanism by which some children from low-income families enter a path of diminished expectations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Despite the dramatic increase in incarcerated mothers that has occurred in the past decades, there is a paucity of family research focusing on the children affected by maternal imprisonment. The present study investigated family environments and intellectual outcomes in 60 children between the ages of 2 and 7 years during their mothers’ incarceration. Multiple methods were used to collect data from children, mothers, and children's nonmaternal caregivers. Results indicated that most children experienced multiple risks across contextual levels. Cumulative caregiver sociodemographic risks predicted children's cognitive abilities, although quality of the home and family environment mediated this relation. Results underscore the importance of children's family environments and highlight the need for increased monitoring, service delivery, and longitudinal research with children of incarcerated mothers and their families.
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We review the literature on children whose mothers are incarcerated in jails or prisons. These children typically experience a great many risk factors besides their mothers' incarceration, including poverty, drug and alcohol problems in their families, community violence, and multiple changes in caregivers. Children's lives are greatly disrupted when mothers are arrested, and most children show emotional and behavioral problems. The impact this has depends on the age of the child, the alternate caregiving arrangements, and the course of the mother's incarceration. Children of incarcerated mothers experience internalizing (fear, withdrawal, depression, emotional disturbance) and externalizing (anger, fighting, stealing, substance abuse) problems, as well as heightened rates of school failure and eventual criminal activity and incarceration. Research in this area is scarce and often of poor quality. A research agenda which is guided by a transactional, ecological, and developmental model, and which examines children's well-being over the course of the mothers' incarceration is suggested.
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G*Power is a free power analysis program for a variety of statistical tests. We present extensions and improvements of the version introduced by Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, and Buchner (2007) in the domain of correlation and regression analyses. In the new version, we have added procedures to analyze the power of tests based on (1) single-sample tetrachoric correlations, (2) comparisons of dependent correlations, (3) bivariate linear regression, (4) multiple linear regression based on the random predictor model, (5) logistic regression, and (6) Poisson regression. We describe these new features and provide a brief introduction to their scope and handling.
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This research examined moderators of naturally occurring self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors assessed whether positive or negative self-fulfilling prophecies were more powerful and whether some targets were more susceptible to self-fulfilling prophecies because of their self-concepts in a particular achievement domain and previous academic records. Participants were 98 teachers and 1,539 students in sixth-grade public school math classes. Results yielded a strong pattern showing that teacher perceptions predicted achievement more strongly for low achievers than for high achievers. Results also yielded a much weaker pattern showing that teacher overestimates predicted achievement more strongly than teacher underestimates. Implications for social perceptual accuracy, self-enhancement theory, and understanding when self-fulfilling prophecies are stronger are discussed.
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Data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being show that approximately 1 in 8 (12.5%) children who are subjects of reports of maltreatment investigated by child welfare services (CWS) agencies have parents who were recently arrested. Compared with other children who come to the attention of CWS agencies, those with arrested parents are younger, disproportionately African American, and significantly more likely tp be in out-of-home care. Approximately 2 in 5 children age 2 and older with arrested parents had a clinically significant emotional or behavioral problem, yet only 1 in 10 received mental health care. Although parent characteristics varied by race, rates of substance abuse, serious mental illness, domestic violence, and problems meeting basic needs were higher among arrested parents than among other parents.
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This article shows that 35 years of empirical research on teacher expectations justifies the following conclusions: (a) Self-fulfilling prophecies in the classroom do occur, but these effects are typically small, they do not accumulate greatly across perceivers or over time, and they may be more likely to dissipate than accumulate; (b) powerful self-fulfilling prophecies may selectively occur among students from stigmatized social groups; (c) whether self-fulfilling prophecies affect intelligence, and whether they in general do more harm than good, remains unclear, and (d) teacher expectations may predict student outcomes more because these expectations are accurate than because they are self-fulfilling. Implications for future research, the role of self-fulfilling prophecies in social problems, and perspectives emphasizing the power of erroneous beliefs to create social reality are discussed.
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Representations of attachment relationships were assessed in 54 children ages 2.5 to 7.5 years whose mothers were currently incarcerated. Consistent with their high-risk status, most (63%) children were classified as having insecure relationships with mothers and caregivers. Secure relationships were more likely when children lived in a stable caregiving situation, when children reacted to separation from the mother with sadness rather than anger, and when children were older. Common reactions to initial separation included sadness, worry, confusion, anger, loneliness, sleep problems, and developmental regressions. Results highlight need for support in families affected by maternal imprisonment, especially efforts to promote stable, continuous placements for children, in addition to underscoring the importance of longitudinal research with this growing but understudied group.
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The goal was to evaluate whether children of incarcerated fathers are more likely to report or exhibit behavioral symptoms than their equally disadvantaged peers without an incarcerated father. During an ongoing longitudinal study of intrauterine cocaine exposure involving 102 children (50% male and 89% black) from urban, low-income homes, questions regarding incarceration of the child's father were asked of the child's primary caregiver at each visit during school age. Children were administered the Children's Depression Inventory between the ages of 6 and 11 years, and their primary caregivers completed the Child Behavior Checklist. In addition, the children's teachers completed the Teacher Report Form. Children's Depression Inventory, Child Behavior Checklist, and Teacher Report Form data obtained at the oldest available age after the first report of paternal incarceration were analyzed. In bivariate analyses, children whose fathers were in jail had higher Children's Depression Inventory total scores compared with children without incarcerated fathers, indicating more depressive symptoms. This finding was robust in multivariate analyses after adjustment for children's age, gender, prenatal cocaine and alcohol exposure, and school-age violence exposure. Teachers reported higher Teacher Report Form externalizing scores for children whose fathers were in jail, after adjustment for age, gender, prenatal cocaine and marijuana exposure, and school-age violence exposure. Children of incarcerated fathers reported more depressive symptoms and their teachers noted more externalizing behaviors, after controlling for other biopsychosocial risks. Interventions targeted to ameliorate the distress of children with incarcerated fathers should be considered.
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Qualitative studies suggest that children react to parental imprisonment by developing internalizing as well as externalizing behaviors. However, no previous study has examined the effects of parental imprisonment on children's internalizing problems using standardized instruments, appropriate comparison groups, and long-term follow-up. Using prospective longitudinal data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, we compared boys separated because of parental imprisonment during their first 10 years of life with four control groups: boys who did not experience separation, boys separated because of hospitalization or death, boys separated for other reasons (usually parental disharmony), and boys whose parents were only imprisoned before the boys' births. Individual, parenting, and family risk factors for internalizing problems were measured when boys were ages 8-11 years. Separation because of parental imprisonment predicted boys' internalizing problems from age 14 to 48, even after controlling for childhood risk factors including parental criminality. Separation because of parental imprisonment also predicted the co-occurrence of internalizing and antisocial problems. These results suggest that parental imprisonment might cause long-lasting internalizing and antisocial problems for children.
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Researchers have estimated that 63 percent of incarcerated women have one or more minor children and most reported living with their children prior to incarceration (Mumola, 2000). Unfortunately, children of incarcerated parents have been a relatively invisible population in the research on the collateral consequences of incarceration. The goal of the current study was to examine the long-term effect of maternal incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system using data from the mother child sample of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Based on existing research, it was hypothesized that the adult offspring of incarcerated mothers would be more likely to have been convicted of a crime or to be sentenced to probation. The effect of maternal incarceration on correlates of criminal behavior in adolescence and early adulthood (e.g., negative peer influences, positive home environment) was also modeled to assess possible indirect effects. The results highlighted the direct effect of incarceration on adult offspring involvement in the criminal justice system, but parental incarceration had little association with correlates of criminal behavior.
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Data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being show that approximately I in 8 (12.5%) children who are subjects of reports of maltreatment investigated by child welfare services (CWS) agencies have parents who were recently arrested. Compared with other children who come to the attention of CWS agencies, those with arrested parents are younger, disproportionately African American, and significantly more likely to be in out-of-home care. Approximately 2 in 5 children age 2 and older with arrested parents had a clinically significant emotional or behavioral problem, yet only 1 in 10 received mental health care. Although parent characteristics varied by race, rates of substance abuse, serious mental illness, domestic violence, and problems meeting basic needs were higher among arrested parents than among other parents.
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Released in 1965, the Moynihan Report traced the severe social and economic distress of poor urban African Americans to high rates of single-parenthood. Against Moynihan's calls for social investment in poor inner-city communities, politics moved in a punitive direction, driving massive growth in the prison population. The authors document the emergence of mass incarceration and describe its significance for African American family life. The era of mass incarceration can be understood as a new stage in the history of American racial inequality. Because of its recent arrival, the social impact of mass incarceration remains poorly understood. The authors conclude by posing several key research questions that can illuminate the effects of dramatic growth in the American penal system.
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This study examined attributes of parenting that are associated with juvenile delinquency and the related differential life experiences of youth with and without a parental incarceration history. Among 1,112 juveniles, 31% had a parental history of incarceration. Bivariate analysis indicated support for three hypotheses: (a) parents who have experienced incarceration will exhibit lower levels of effective parenting and greater association with factors that can impede their parenting abilities, namely substance abuse and mental illness; (b) youth who have parents with an incarceration history will be more likely to have experienced negative effects of ineffective parenting, namely abuse and out of home placement; and (c) youth with a parental incarceration history will have longer and more serious delinquent histories of their own. Through binary logistic regression analysis, support was not found for the fourth hypothesis that history of parental incarceration predicts delinquent behavior.
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Contrasts the naturalistic research paradigm with the scientific model, noting that the naturalistic paradigm assumes multiple reality, subject-object interrelatedness, and contextuality. Skills required for the pursuit of naturalistic inquiry are described. (JEG)
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This report presents information on the characteristics of parents incarcerated in state or federal prisons. Data were obtained from personal interviews conducted for the 1997 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities. Findings indicated that a majority of state and federal prisoners were the parents of at least one minor child. Prior to incarceration, 44 percent of fathers and 64 percent of mothers lived with their children. Nearly half of incarcerated parents were black; about a quarter were white. Parents in state prison were younger than those in federal prison. Most parents in state (70 percent) and federal (55 percent) prisons lacked a high school diploma. Forty percent of fathers and 60 percent of mothers in state prison had at least weekly contact with their children. In state prisons, mothers consistently reported more frequent contact with their children than fathers. In federal prisons, mothers and fathers had more similar levels of contact with their children. A majority of incarcerated parents were violent offenders or drug traffickers. A majority of parents in state prison used drugs in the month before their offense. One-third of mothers in state prison committed their crime to obtain drugs or money for drugs. The report also presents information on parents' marital status, expected time served, previous drug and alcohol use, prior convictions and incarcerations, sex differences in type of offenses, mental illness, and previous homelessness. The report's appendix describes the methodology and presents information on the standard errors for selected characteristics of state and federal prisoners with minor children. (KB)
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This chapter provides an overview of research on accuracy, error, bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies. It also reviews a research showing that teacher expectations predict student achievement—mainly because they are accurate, although they do lead to small self-fulfilling prophecies and biases. The conditions under which self-fulfilling prophecies might be considerably more powerful are embarked. The results of new research showing that teacher expectancy effects are more powerful among girls, students from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds or African–Americans are also addressed. Some evidence of bias show differences in teacher's perceptions of students from the differing groups corresponded well to actual differences among those same groups of students. The chapter also analyzes ways to distinguish among self fulfilling prophecies, perceptual biases, and accuracy, and examines processes underlying expectancy-related phenomena—discoveries have some relevance and applicability to many other relationships beyond teachers and students. Conceptual model of relationships between teacher perceptions and student achievement and some evidence regarding the role of stereotypes in naturally occurring person perception is also explained in the chapter.
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States that the impact of parental incarceration on minor children has been well documented. Children with at least 1 parent in prison are at greater risk to suffer from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, anger, and attention deficiencies. In comparison to the research on children, less emphasis has been placed on how mothers are affected when they are incarcerated away from their children. The current research focus is how children's visitation programs and parenting classes can improve the relationships between incarcerated women and their children. 58 female prisoners (aged 20-46 yrs) participating in a specialized children's visitation program were interviewed to gain their perceptions of their relationships with their children (n=108; aged 1-16 yrs) and how the program had affected this bond. A comparison group of women not in the program were also questioned about their relationships with their children. The authors suggest that incarcerated mothers respond positively to institutional efforts to keep them in touch with their children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
The current study investigates differences between inmate mothers’ and fathers’ reported rates of incarceration for family members, adult children, predictors of adult children’s incarceration, and living situations of minor children. Participants included 6,146 inmates who participated in the U.S. Department of Justice Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities. Mothers were 2.5 times more likely to report that their adult children were incarcerated than fathers; mothers’ regular drug use predicted adult child incarceration. Incarcerated mothers reported greater familial incarceration and their minor children were more likely to be in foster and other nonfamilial care situations than incarcerated fathers. As risk factors accumulated, there were greater rates of adult child incarceration, with a more obvious relationship for mothers.
Article
Although prior work has substantiated the role of external attributes in juvenile court decision making, no study to date has examined how family situational factors as well as maternal and paternal incarceration affect juvenile court officials' responses to troubled youth. Using quantitative and qualitative juvenile court data from a large urban county in the southwest, this study draws on attribution theory to examine how family structure, perceptions of family dysfunction, and parental incarceration influence out-of-home placement decisions. Findings reveal that juvenile court officials' perceptions of good and bad families inform their decision making. This study emphasizes the need to unravel the intricate effects of maternal and paternal incarceration and officials' attributions about families and family structure on juvenile court decision making.
Article
Little is known about the experience of families affected by incarceration, yet current trends indicate that millions of children have a parent who is imprisoned. Using a conceptual framework that acknowledges the losses associated with a parent's incarceration, 56 caregivers visiting an incarcerated family member during children's visiting hours were interviewed. The interview gathered information about family, health, economics, and the legal aspects of the inmate's situation. Overall, families were at risk economically before incarceration, and the most vulnerable became even more financially strained afterward. Other problems believed to be created by incarceration included parenting strain, emotional stress, and concerns about children's loss of involvement with their incarcerated parent. Implications for family practice and policy are discussed.
Article
The number of children who experience parental incarceration continues to rise with the United States. In 1999, an estimated 1.5million minor children had a parent in a United States prison. One-fifth of these children are under 5years of age (Mumola, Incarcerated parents and their children, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, 2000). A brief overview of some of the issues associated with parental incarceration is presented. The inclusion of books about having a parent in prison in the classroom is discussed as one method of supporting children and families.
Article
This study examined aspects of the school, community, and home adjustment of 58 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 20 whose mothers were incarcerated. High rates of school drop-out (36%) were observed. Dropping out was related to their mother's educational attainment. These adolescents were more than four times as likely to be out of school than a sample of their best friends; four times more likely to be suspended; three times more likely to be significantly absent from school and nearly four times as likely to be failing classes. More than half of these children required school visits for disciplinary reasons during the previous 12 months, and more than a quarter of them had been arrested. School problems and delinquent behavior might be related to the extent of maternal drug use. Although these adolescents initially experienced difficulty adapting to structured placements, those who were living in homes with rules and with family members had better educational outcomes, as did children who communicated frequently with their mothers.
Article
Incarcerated mothers represent a rapidly growing sector of the prison population. This review of the literature presents research examining the psychological and socio-emotional well-being of children with an incarcerated mother, highlighting risk and protective factors at different stages of children's development. Child outcomes are reviewed from a developmental perspective with a focus on children's connectedness to family and school. Attachment disruptions and disorganization are explored as outcomes for infants and toddlers; academic difficulties for school-aged children are discussed; and delinquency and risky behaviors that may place adolescent children at increased risk for incarceration themselves are reviewed. Next, special concerns and challenges associated with working with children and families with an incarcerated mother are highlighted. Future research recommendations are made that include methodological improvements and the use of an interdisciplinary perspective that focuses on family processes.
Article
The information reported in this article is based on data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW), a study of a representative sample of children who were subjects of reports of maltreatment. Details of mothers' arrest histories were used to group together mothers who shared similar arrest history characteristics. Three subgroups were identified: (1) mothers with dated arrest histories, (2) mothers with protracted arrest histories, and (3) mothers who were first arrested at a relatively late age. Analyses examined between-group differences in the child, parent, and family problems present in these families. Findings suggest that differences in mothers' arrest histories are associated with meaningfully different service needs. More generally, however, families in which mothers have been arrested have a greater number of service needs making them among the more complex cases confronting child protective service agencies.
Article
This study explores the impact of parental incarceration on children, from the children's own perspectives. The sample includes thirty-four children interviewed regarding how having a parent in prison affected their family and peer relationships, school experiences, their reactions to prison visits, and perceptions of prison. The interviews explored both their challenges and their strengths. The children revealed a variety stresses around social isolation and worrying about their caregivers, but also demonstrated resilience in locating venues for support and self-sufficiency. Recommendations for policy, service, and community actions and interventions are presented.
Article
This is a preliminary report on the characteristics, experiences, and behavior of 88 adolescent, primarily African-American, children of incarcerated urban addict mothers that examines the association of age, gender, and risk factor profiles with the children's adjustment status defined in terms of self-reported questionnaire information and selected personality/behavioral assessment inventories. In spite of the existence of adverse circumstances in their lives, including the incarceration of their substance-abusing mothers, results revealed that the majority of these children were neither especially deviant nor maladjusted, all but a small percentage having successfully avoided substance abuse and the adoption of a deviant lifestyle at this point in their development. In most cases, mother surrogates (usually a grandmother or other family member) had for many years functioned as primary caregivers of the children prior to the incarceration of their birth mothers, which may have attenuated the negative impact ordinarily associated with a mother's absence from the home. However, there was a general indication of problematic school behavior and vulnerability to deviant peer influences that should be addressed in efforts aimed at preventing the escalation of deviant activity in such children. Also, in almost all cases, there was a readily observable need for the provision of caseworker support services to the current caregivers of the children.
Article
This study examined the associations among child demographic variables, teacher perceptions of parent-teacher and student-teacher relationship quality, and teacher perceptions of children's academic abilities in an ethnically diverse sample of 607 academically at-risk first grade children. Relative to relationships with African American children and parents, teachers rated their relationships with White and Hispanic children and parents more positively. Measures of relationship quality added unique variance to teachers' perceptions of children's abilities, controlling for parent educational level and measured ability. Relationship variables fully mediated the association between African American status and teachers' perceptions of children's abilities. Implications of the findings for teacher in-service and professional development and for parent involvement programs are discussed.
Article
The population of incarcerated individuals in the United States has risen dramatically in the last decade. There is very little information available about the psychological reactions or adjustment of the children of these incarcerated individuals, although it is likely that this population of apparently high risk children also has increased. This article reviews the literature on the behavioral problems and adjustment of children during the time of their parent's incarceration. It discusses these children and their behavior in the context of their family characteristics, their prognosis, and their current clinical needs.
Article
Summary — Within each of 18 classrooms, an average of 20% of the children were reported to classroom teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual gains. Eight months later these "unusual" children (who had actually been selected at random) showed significantly greater gains in IQ than did the remaining chil- dren in the control group. These effects of teachers' expectancies operated prima- rily among the younger children. 1 Experiments have shown that in behavioral research employing human or animal Ss, E's expect- ancy can be a significant determinant of S's response (Rosenthal, 1964, in press). In studies employing animals, for example, E's led to believe that their rat Ss had been bred for superior learning ability obtained performance superior to that obtained by Es led to believe their rats had been bred for inferior learning ability (Rosenthal & Fode, 1963; Rosenthal & Lawson, 1964). The present study was designed to extend the generality of this finding from Es to teachers and from animal Ss to school children. 2 Flanagan (1960) has developed a nonverbal intelligence test (Tests of General Ability or TOGA) which is not explicitly dependent on such school learned skills as reading, writing, and arith- metic. The test is composed of two types of items, "verbal" and "reasoning." The "verbal" items measure the child's level of information, vocabulary, and concepts. The "reasoning" items mea- sure the child's concept formation ability by employing abstract line drawings. Flanagan's pur- pose in developing the TOGA was "to provide a relatively fair measure of intelligence for all individuals, even those who have had atypical opportunities to learn" (1960, p. 6). 3 Flanagan's test was administered to all children in an elementary school, disguised as a test designed to predict academic "blooming" or intellectual gain. Within each of the six grades in the school were three classrooms, one each of children performing at above average, average, and below average levels of scholastic achievement. In each of the 18 classes an average of 20% of the children were assigned to the experimental condition. The names of these children were given to each teacher who was told that their scores on the "test for intellectual blooming" indicated that they would show unusual intellectual gains during the academic year. Actually, the children had been assigned to the experimental condition by means of a table of random numbers. The exper- imental treatment for these children, then, consisted of nothing more than being identified to their teachers as children who would show unusual intellectual gains.
Article
The study sought to determine the relationship between parental incarceration and behavioral and family characteristics among children in a day hospital. Chi square analysis and t tests were used to compare preadmission characteristics and teachers' behavioral ratings of a group of 16 children in a day hospital setting who had experienced the incarceration of one or both parents and a group of 21 children in that setting who had no history of parental incarceration. Children in the parental incarceration group were significantly more likely to have experienced parental substance abuse than those whose parents had not been incarcerated. A history of child abuse or maltreatment appeared to be more likely among the parental incarceration group. Boys whose fathers had been incarcerated received higher teacher ratings of delinquent and aggressive behavior. Paternal incarceration among girls was associated with a significant increase in attention problems. A history of parental incarceration may be quite common in some mental health samples of children. It appears to be associated with severe family dysfunction and behavioral disorders.
Article
Interpersonal expectancy effects refer to the phenomena whereby one person's expectation for another person's behavior comes to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The author examines the history and diversity of this area of inquiry, showing that the expectations of psychological researchers, classroom teachers, judges in the courtroom, business executives, and health care providers can unintentionally affect the responses of their research participants, pupils, jurors, employees, and patients. Using meta-analytic procedures, the author examines (a) moderator variables associated with the magnitude of interpersonal expectancy effects and (b) mediator variables implicated in the communication of interpersonal expectations. The author considers the social importance of the magnitudes of the obtained effects and points out research still needed to clarify issues in the mediation of these effects.
Article
Background: Prisoners' children appear to suffer profound psychosocial difficulties during their parents' imprisonment. However, no previous study has examined later-life outcomes for prisoners' children compared to children separated from parents for other reasons. We hypothesise that parental imprisonment predicts boys' antisocial and delinquent behaviour partly because of the trauma of separation, partly because parental imprisonment is a marker for parental criminality, and partly because of childhood risks associated with parental imprisonment. Method: This study uses prospective longitudinal data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). The CSDD includes data on 411 Inner London males and their parents. We compare boys separated by parental imprisonment during their first 10 years of life with four control groups: boys who did not experience separation, boys separated by hospital or death, boys separated for other reasons (usually disharmony), and boys whose parents were only imprisoned before their birth. Individual, parenting, and family risk factors for delinquency were measured when boys were aged 8-11. Eleven antisocial and delinquent outcomes were assessed between ages 14 and 40. Results: Separation because of parental imprisonment predicted all antisocial-delinquent outcomes compared to the four control conditions. Separation caused by parental imprisonment was also strongly associated with many other childhood risk factors for delinquency. After controlling for parental convictions and other childhood risk factors, separation caused by parental imprisonment still predicted several antisocial-delinquent outcomes, even up to age 32, compared with other types of separation. Conclusions: Prisoners' children are a highly vulnerable group with multiple risk factors for adverse outcomes. Parental imprisonment appears to affect children over and above separation experiences and associated risks. Further research on possible moderating and mediating factors such as stigma, reduction in family income and reduced quality of care is required to identify the mechanisms by which parental imprisonment affects children.
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