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Home > Case Support > Incarcerated Parents Project > IPP Resources > What’s the Research Saying > LITERATURE > Wellbeing Impacts on Children With An Incarcerated Parent
Wellbeing Impacts on Children With An Incarcerated Parent

*Please note: This page is still in progress. More links will be posted soon.*

(in alphabetical order)

 

External Resources

Parental Incarceration and Child Well-Being

This external link contains a pdf of a bibliography drafted by research and academic Christopher Wildeman in 2016. The work was funded by the Sills Family Foundation and co-sponsored by the Osborne Association’s New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.  While the document itself says the online source could be found on the funders’ websites, WDA IPP located the resource online elsewhere.

 

Reports

This social study of incarcerated parents in North Dakota was conducted by social researchers.  Noting youth with criminal fathers are reportedly four times more likely to engage in violent crime and that prosocial parental attachment and monitoring is strongly correlated with reductions in delinquency; and suggesting that parent-child interventions with incarcerated individuals represent an opportunity to break this cycle of intergenerational criminality.

The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), in collaboration with the Urban Institute and Community Works West, have developed a set of model practices to facilitate parent-child communication and contact during parental incarceration. The objective of this document is to detail a set of practices that correctional administrators can implement to remove barriers that inhibit children from cultivating or maintaining relationships with their incarcerated parents during and immediately after incarceration. These practices also involve children’s co-parents and caregivers. To accomplish this objective, we suggest that correctional administrators (1) consider that children need and want to have a relationship with their incarcerated parents and vice versa; (2) allow incarcerated parents to take responsibility for their children; and (3) provide opportunities for families to communicate, interact, and bond.

This paper discusses three key policy areas regarding incarcerated mothers and fathers in Oregon: prison nurseries and community-based residential parenting programs; foster care laws; and parenting programs for incarcerated fathers. After reviewing background and best practices associated with policy implementation in each area, this paper explores ways in which policymakers, stakeholders and advocates might address each policy area in Oregon and suggests the formation of a legislative task force to address these issues.

This study’s researchers recognized that parental incarceration is both an adverse childhood experience (ACE) and an influencer of pediatric health. Evidence that rural America sees the highest incarceration rates and substantial inequities in pediatric health care access and services, the researchers attempted to identify if the prevalence of parental incarceration and associated sociodemographic factors vary across urban, suburban, and rural regions of the United States.

More than 5 million U.S. children have had a parent in jail or prison at some point in their lives. The incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child’s well-being as abuse or domestic violence. But while states spend heavily on corrections, few resources exist to support those left behind. A Shared Sentence offers commonsense proposals to address the increased poverty and stress that children of incarcerated parents experience.

This publication from the ABA Center on Children and the Law, the Women’s Refugee Commission, and the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare includes frequently asked questions about separated children and the child welfare system.

This study explored the impact of having an incarcerated parent on youth (ages 10–18) wellbeing and identified recommendations from youth addressing the challenges of having an incarcerated parent and promote individual and community flourishing. The researchers organized data collected form youth into thematic categories, including incarcerations’ impact on families and communities and incarcerations’ influence on mental health and flourishing.

 

Social Research 

In this developmentally oriented review, we summarize research on associations between parental incarceration and child well-being and suggest areas where developmental scientists can contribute. While most analyses of large population-based U.S., datasets have found that experiencing paternal incarceration typically has detrimental implications for child well-being, especially as children grow older, analyses of maternal incarceration have yielded less consistent findings.

  • Advancing Early Relational Health: A Collaborative Exploration of a Research Agenda by Dani Dumitriu, Andréane Lavallée, Jessica L Riggs, Cynthia A Frosch, Tyson V Barker, Debra L Best, Brenda Blasingame, Jessica Bushar, Dominique Charlot-Swilley, Elizabeth Erickson, Morgan A Finkel, Bryn Fortune, Leah Gillen, Marty Martinez, Usha Ramachandran, Lee M Sanders, David W Willis, Nikki Shearman, Frontiers in Pediatrics, 11, 1259022 (2023)

In this report, the authors introduce the Early Relational Health (ERH) Learning Community’s bold, large-scale, collaborative, data-driven and practice-informed research agenda focused on furthering our mechanistic understanding of ERH and identifying feasible and effective practices for making ERH promotion a routine and integrated component of pediatric primary care. 

Having contact with incarcerated parents through visits, phone calls, and letters has long been considered important for family well-being during and following incarceration, yet few researchers, practitioners, or policymakers have considered this issue from the child’s perspective. Recent research has shown that the link between parental incarceration and trauma symptoms can be mediated through the quality of parental-visitation experiences. 

The study aims to compare youth in foster care as a result of parental death or youth in foster care as a result of parental incarceration with youth in care because of child maltreatment in terms of the length of time to achieve permanency. Holding all other variables constant, entering care as a result of parental death more than doubled the average time to exit, and these youth were significantly less likely to exit to permanency when compared to children entering care for other maltreatment reasons. Entering care as a result of parental incarceration led to a 24% longer time to exit compared to children entering care for other maltreatment reasons.

This study tests a group-based secular contemplative practice intervention, Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), with parents of young children. Findings include that children of parents in the CBCT group experienced significant decreases in cortisol at the postintervention assessment, as compared with the control group even though parent cortisol and self-report measures did not significantly change other than a small effect on clinical levels of parenting stress.  

Given that child adversity has a negative impact on child and adult health, this study aimed to determine whether adverse family experiences were associated with use of preventive health care among children and whether insurance status affected this association. Findings are consistent with newer research showing that some disadvantage or adversity is associated with more optimal use of preventive health care.

This study assesses the association between exposure to the US criminal legal system and well-being of study participants who responded to questions about their own criminal legal system exposure, including police stops, arrests, and incarceration. Significant findings include that exposure to police stops, arrests, and incarceration were each associated with lower well-being in every domain compared with those not exposed to the criminal legal system; that longer durations of incarceration and multiple incarcerations were associated with progressively lower well-being; and that people stopped and frisked by the police had low well-being similar to that of those who had been incarcerated multiple times.

This study examines whether foster care entry rates are negatively associated with rates of child mortality due to child abuse and/or neglect. The study analyzed 3.4 million records of children in state-supervised foster care from 2010 to 2023 and 24108 child fatalities that states attributed to child abuse and/or neglect. In this cross-sectional study, child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates. This evidence suggests that there is not a negative association between child maltreatment mortality rates and foster care entry rates.

Using national child welfare data, the researchers created a longitudinal data set to examine a subset of foster children (7%) who entered care due to parental incarceration. Spanning FY 2005–2017, the dataset allowed them to compare children who entered care due to parental incarceration to children entering for other reasons. Some findings include that the researchers found children of incarcerated parents were younger (median age of 4 vs. 6), more often White (47% vs. 42%), and less often Black (15% vs. 20%) when compared to other foster children. 

This study examined reactions of young children to their parent’s arrest.  They found when their emotional symptoms were high, children who witnessed parental arrest were more likely to have poorer health initially and more intense negative reactions to the parent leaving for jail. They also found when children’s general emotional symptoms were low, children who witnessed their parent’s arrest were more likely to exhibit developmental delays, especially in their early academic skills, compared to children who did not witness the arrest.

The researchers of this study set out to determine if longitudinal associations exist between parental incarceration (specific to mother incarceration and father incarceration as well) and health care use or health behaviors among a national sample of young adults.  Their results include among other things found specific correlations with unhealthy behaviors in young adulthood leading them to conclude that the effects of incarceration extend beyond incarcerated individuals, specifically that experiencing parental incarceration in childhood was associated with lower health care use and unhealthy behaviors in young adulthood. (no public link directly to the article could be located).

  • Impact of Incarceration on Families – Dana DeHart, Ph.D., Cheri Shapiro, Ph.D., & James W. Hardin, Ph.D., Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (distr.)(2018)

This report reviews a single-jurisdiction pilot study, in which the researchers identify qualitative themes regarding impact of incarceration in the lives of prisoners and their families. Findings include that the children’s risk of involvement in the juvenile justice system increased over time from before the parent’s incarceration to after the incarceration; regarding children’s educational performance, minor family members’ math and reading scores were higher before incarceration than during incarceration; and data on economic social services indicate that families experienced a decrease in the use of economic services during incarceration and possibly after incarceration. 

Across Canada, Child Protection Services (CPS) disrupt Indigenous families by apprehending their children at alarmingly high rates. The harms borne by children in out-of-home care (OoHC) have been extensively documented. The researchers examined the impact of OoHC on Manitoba children’s health and legal system outcomes to provide rigorous evidence on how discretionary decision-making by CPS agencies can affect these outcomes.

The authors provided background that there is increasing evidence from the fields of development psychology, neurobiology and animal epigenetic studies that neglect, parental inconsistency and a lack of love can lead to long-term mental health problems as well as to reduced overall potential and happiness. In this paper, the authors consider the evidence for this claim across several disciplines and conclude that the support of babies and their parents in the first two years of life to be a crucial aim of public health groups in the community.

  • Incarcerated Adults with Dependent Children by Daniel M. Leeds, Juliana Pearson, Simone Robers, and Leslie Scott, Retrieved 12/05/2025 from PIAAC Gateway website: https://www.piaacgateway.com/researchpapers#2020. Washington, DC (2020).

This commissioned paper examines data from the 2014 PIAAC prison study to determine whether certain factors influence the educational attainment, employment, economic mobility, and successful reentry of justice-involved parents of minor children.  The researchers specifically focus on questions, like what education attainment, literacy skills and numeracy skills levels they achieve and whether there is intergenerational correlation between their and their parents’ skill levels; and what factors if any facilitate or impede incarcerated adults’ educational progress and do factors differ if they are parents.

With this study, the researchers tried to understand health care providers’ perceptions, clinical considerations, and clinical actions towards children with incarcerated parents. The researchers found that 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.

This study examines differences and disparities by region, demography, and adverse childhood experiences in Minnesota youth experiencing parental incarceration. Findings include that even though approx. 17% of youth ever experienced parental incarceration, there were significant regional disparities as those outside of metropolitan areas were more likely to report parental incarceration, especially Native youth, Black youth, and other youth of color in rural areas.

The researchers examined research published from 2000 to 2017 on the consequences of parental incarceration for child health in the United States, focusing on specific health outcomes and considering broader indicators of child well-being, and they published four findings. (no public link directly to the article could be located).

This study examines whether parental incarceration was associated with child overweight at age 9 and whether that association differed by which parent was incarcerated. Their findings contribute to an emerging body of research suggesting that the consequences of parental incarceration for young children’s physical health may differ by whether a child’s mother or father has ever been incarcerated, though the researchers urge caution at generalizing the findings towards children experiencing maternal incarceration.

This study’s researchers examined 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. 

This study examined the association between parental incarceration and parent-youth closeness.  The researchers had findings, including that parental incarceration is negatively associated with closeness between youth and their incarcerated parents; that the timing of first parental incarceration is important; that parental incarcera­tion in early or middle childhood is negatively associated with closeness between youth and their incarcerated parent, and that parental incarceration in adolescence is positively associ­ated with closeness between youth and their nonincarcerated parent. Also, relationships between coparents explain some of the association between paternal incarcera­tion in early childhood and father-youth closeness.

This research aimed to describe the prevalence of children of incarcerated parents in a sample of homeless/highly mobile children, examine the relationship between parental incarceration and other risk factors, and investigate the effect of parental incarceration on child academic and mental health outcomes. The researchers concluded among other things that compared to children with no history of parental incarceration, child of incarcerated parents experienced more negative life events.

This study explored how relationship closeness across six contexts from distinct profiles among Minnesota youth with a history of parental incarceration and how these profiles relate to self-reported anxiety and depression.

This study examines the association between parental relationship churning (i.e., the separation and reunification of one’s biological parents) and adolescent well-being. Research examines how instability in parental romantic relationships is linked to adolescent well-being, but it has largely neglected instability and transitions that occur within, rather than between, relationships. Family stress and family boundary ambiguity theories suggest that adolescents from churning families will experience deleterious outcomes when compared with their counterparts in stably together families. 

This report uses the National Survey of Children’s Health to examine both the prevalence of parental incarceration and child outcomes associated with it.

The findings of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report are based on self-reported data collected through face-to-face interviews with a national sample of state and federal prisoners age 18 or older in the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates.

The study researchers sought to compare the health of youth with known personal or family justice involvement and a matched cohort of youth without known personal or family justice involvement. The study illuminates the vast disparities be­tween youth with indirect or direct contact with the criminal legal system and matched youth with no documented contact. 

This study examines the effect of parental incarceration and the important consequences for youth’s adjustment and school-based outcomes. Findings include that parental incarceration was significantly associated with students’ poor school-based outcomes, but varied school setting. Among youth in public schools, parental incarceration was consistently associated with poor school outcomes, but there were mixed effects among youth in alternative learning centers and no significant effects among youth in juvenile correctional facilities.

This research and evaluation study on sports involvement among adolescents impacted by parental incarceration, because a significant body of research among adolescents in general demonstrates sports team participation is associated with better outcomes. The researchers addressed important gaps in research by estimating the prevalence of sports team participation among adolescents impacted by parental incarceration, examining whether sports team participation differed by socioeconomic status in this population, and testing associations between sports team participation and academic engagement, signs of emotional distress, and substance use. 

Compiled by medical researchers at Cornell University’s medical college, advocates may find it a useful tool for educating decision-makers and policymakers on behalf of separated families, separated children, or incarcerated parents.   This well-sourced fact sheet details the medical aspects of the trauma of child separation. 

This publication is currently located on the U.S. Department of Education website.  The author notes throughout the publication the consequences of parental incarceration on their family members, including parents, romantic partners, and sons and daughters and focuses on research that shows parental incarceration negatively affects children’s educational outcomes and opportunities.

This study details the prevalence of youth at the intersection of parental incarceration and foster care, their demographic characteristics, and heterogeneity in their mental health. Findings include that nearly 2 % of students experienced both parental incarceration and foster care, with a disproportionate number of those identifying as youth of color, experiencing poverty, and/or living in rural communities. Both parental incarceration and foster care were separately linked with poor mental health, yet experiencing both was associated with higher odds of anxiety, depression, self-injury, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, diagnosis, and treatment. Youth with proximal multiplicative exposure (recent foster care and current parental incarceration) reported the most adverse mental health symptoms.

 

 

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