Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Children and Their Parents

Children depend on their parents to help them meet their needs. Children also depend on their parents to help them learn how to meet their needs.

If a parent is incarcerated, children find barriers to communicating with that parent. Some of those barriers are the:
  • institutional policies and practices,
  • child's beliefs about what has happened,
  • parent's sense of responsibility, and
  • other caregivers in the family.
So what happens to the relationship between parent and child when a parent is incarcerated?

Since the relationships children have with their fathers are disrupted by the crime that led to an arrest, conviction, and imprisonment, the needs of both the child and the parent require attention.

For example, fathers who are incarcerated need to learn the
  • effects of their incarceration on their children,
  • effects of the crimes they committed on their children,
  • consequences of the incarceration on themselves, and
  • how to prevent those events from recurring.
The children of incarcerated parents need to learn
  • how to cope with the trauma of loss, and change,
  • what it all means to the family,
  • who is responsible for what, and
  • what it means about themselves.
Keeping this in mind, fathers who want to be responsible also need to understand and act on co-parenting principles.

In other words, the children have mothers too. Regardless what the father has done, has learned, or changes, the children still have mothers.

Responsible fathers learn to face the challenges of co-parenting the children. This is true whether they are reunited with the children after incarceration or not. In other words, both the mother and father are parents in the child's mind.

More on co-parenting in another posting.