Mentoring for Children of Incarcerated Parents – National Mentoring Resource Center Review

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Group Review Board
G. Roger Jarjoura, Ph.D.
(American Institutes for Research)
National Mentoring Resource Center

This review examines research on mentoring for children of incarcerated parents. The review is organized around four questions:  (1) What is the demonstrated effectiveness of mentoring for children of incarcerated parents? (2) What factors condition or shape the effectiveness of mentoring for this population? (3) ——What are the intervening processes that are most important in linking mentoring to outcomes for children of incarcerated parents?  (4) ——To what extent have efforts to provide mentoring to this population reached and engaged targeted youth, been implemented with high quality, and been adopted and sustained by host organizations and settings?

Rigorous research on mentoring for children of incarcerated parents is scarce and only just starting to lay a foundation for understanding the impact of mentoring for this population. This research is even more limited with respect to clarifying the conditions and processes that may be required for optimizing benefits to youth. Combining the available evidence on mentoring children of incarcerated parents with the larger body of literature on the nature and experiences of this youth population, however, suggests a number of noteworthy possibilities with regard to each of the above questions.  These include:

Program-arranged mentoring for the children of incarcerated parents has the potential to contribute to observable improvements in their behavior, relationships, and their emotional well-being.

  1. Positive outcomes from mentoring may be more evident while the youth are actively engaged with their mentors, although sustaining the length of the mentoring relationship for the children of incarcerated parents is apparently difficult for programs.
  2. ——The benefits of mentoring for this population may be influenced by the child’s capacity for trust and resilience, the strength of the relationship between child and the incarcerated caregiver, and whether this person is the child’s biological parent.
  3. ——Processes involving positive youth development, resilience and coping skills, and self-esteem may be instrumental as pathways through which mentoring is beneficial for children of incarcerated parents.
  4. As with mentoring programs in general, and those serving higher-risk youth in particular, it is critically important to provide mentors with high-quality pre-match training and ongoing support from agency staff.

The review concludes with insights and recommendations for practice based on currently available knowledge. These recommendations include taking a “networked” approach to supporting the child with an emphasis on parent involvement, providing more robust mentor training, emphasizing youth development principles in relationship activities, and planning for extending these relationships or transitioning the youth from one mentor to another as a way of sustaining program impacts over longer periods of time.

Introduction

Much has been written about the impact of incarceration on the children of prisoners. As with most familial and environmental circumstances, the extent to which the incarceration affects a child varies across individuals and situations and having an incarcerated parent does not predetermine a child’s outcomes. However, in general, incarceration of a parent(s) may increase the likelihood that a child experiences poverty, disruption in the family, and even a sense of shame stemming from the stigma others may attribute to the imprisonment of a parent.1 In addition, these children may have already experienced a number of risk factors that contributed to the incarceration of the parent(s), so the incarceration itself may enhance the negative impact the child is facing. The research on this youth population has pointed to negative outcomes for the children that are psychological, academic, and behavioral. A recent systematic review, though, found the incarceration of a parent to be related to a higher likelihood of antisocial behavior on the part of the children, but not a higher likelihood of involvement with substances, mental health issues, or academic failure.

Disruption in the family, particularly the loss or lack of a stable adult role model, is one of the biggest challenges facing these children, potentially contributing to negative outcomes. It is, therefore, not surprising that policy makers and practitioners have proposed mentoring as a potential intervention for this group of young people. The research pointing to the protective influence of supportive, positive, nonparental adults, particularly for youth experiencing individual and environmental risk,3, 4, 5, 6 is at least suggestive that providing adult mentors for the children of incarcerated parents may be an effective strategy to improve psychological, academic, and behavioral outcomes. This review focuses on mentoring as a potential intervention for children of incarcerated parents and addresses the following specific questions:

  1. What is the demonstrated effectiveness of mentoring for children of parents or caregivers who are incarcerated?
  2. To what extent are the benefits of group mentoring likely to depend on characteristics and backgrounds of the youth and/or their mentor(s) or program practices?
  3. To what extent do the benefits of mentoring for children of incarcerated parents appear likely to be contingent on such considerations as the different characteristics of the youth involved and/or their mentors, the circumstances surrounding the parent or caregiver’s incarceration, and the programmatic practices or approaches that are employed?
  4. What intervening pathways or variables appear likely to be most important in linking mentoring to beneficial outcomes for children of incarcerated parents?
  5. To what extent have efforts to provide mentoring for children of incarcerated parents reached and engaged this population, achieved high quality implementation, and been adopted and sustained by host organizations and settings? What factors predict better reach, implementation, and adoption/sustainability?

In this review, children of incarcerated parents are defined as young people who have experienced the incarceration of at least one of their parents or primary caregivers while growing up. The impact of the disruption to the family may last beyond the actual period of imprisonment and because the risk factors that contributed to the parent’s incarceration may still be evident even after the parent’s re-entry into the community and to the family.

For these reasons, the designation children of incarcerated parents is considered to continue to apply to children of previously incarcerated parents or caregivers until they reach 18 years of age. Historically, there was more concern about the impact of incarceration in state or federal prisons, because the period of imprisonment lasts for one year or longer (whereas incarceration in local jails may last for only a short period of time). Accordingly, the earliest mentoring projects that focused strategically on serving the children of incarcerated parents limited their focus to children with parents in these types of correctional settings. Over time, though, programs serving this population of young people, along with funding for those programs, have expanded the scope of services to include children with parents in local jails, and even children from households where any adult (i.e., not just a parent, but potentially an extended family member or a close family friend living with the family) has been incarcerated or from households in neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by incarceration. Throughout this review, care will be taken to note the scope of the research evidence with regard to the specific types of youth served by the programs targeting children of incarcerated parents.
This review considers mentoring to be relationships and activities that take place between youth (i.e., mentees) and older or more experienced persons (i.e., mentors) who are acting in a non-professional helping capacity – whether through a program or more informally – to provide support that benefits one or more areas of the young person’s development (for further detail, see What is Mentoring?).

This review considers mentoring to be relationships and activities that take place between youth (i.e., mentees) and older or more experienced persons (i.e., mentors) who are acting in a non-professional helping capacity – whether through a program or more informally – to provide support that benefits one or more areas of the young person’s development (for further detail, see What is Mentoring?).

A systematic literature search for research on mentoring children of incarcerated parents was carried out to identify articles, book chapters, and evaluation reports with findings pertinent to one or more of the central questions for this review. This search identified a total of only nine (9) studies that met these criteria. The review of available research for each question is preceded by a background section that helps frame the question by considering relevant findings from the broader body of research on the effects of parental incarceration on children.

Implications for Practice
(Mike Garringer, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership)

Providing mentors to children of incarcerated parents has been one of the more prominent trends in the youth mentoring field over the past decade, with substantial federal and private investment in services that target these youth during recruitment or offer additional enhanced forms of mentoring to meet the additional needs and risks of this population. Programs such as Amachi have expanded over this time to be truly national in scope, while federal agencies such as the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention have rightly noted that prevention and intervention services aimed at these youth might play a pivotal role in reducing future crime and breaking multigenerational cycles of incarceration and family dysfunction.
But for all the investment in this type of programming, there remains, as seen in this review, little in the way of detailed, evidence-based information about how mentoring might serve this population best. In many cases, this is not for a lack of effort. As noted in the review, there have been several attempts to study the mentoring provided these youth over the years. Unfortunately, these research efforts have been undermined to some degree by issues of attrition (too many youth ending their participation in the study causing issues with the usefulness of the results) or from an emphasis on outcomes over the nuances of service delivery. Simply put, the field has struggled to measure the impact of these programs, let alone test the types of programmatic details that would help today’s practitioners design more effective programs for children with an incarcerated parent.
But in spite of these research limitations, there are several things that practitioners should keep in mind in designing programs intended to serve this population well, or at the very least, to ensure that children of incarcerated parents in traditional programs get the extra support they need and deserve.

  1. A NETWORKED APPROACH THAT DEEPLY INVOLVES PARENTS AND CAREGIVERS IS A GOOD START
  2. A POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT APPROACH WILL GET MENTORS GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
  3. TRAINING FOR MENTORS IN TRUST-BUILDING AND COMMUNICATING WITH THE FAMILY IS A MUST
  4. PROGRAMS MAY WANT TO THINK ABOUT HOW TO EXTEND THE BENEFITS OF THE MENTORING EXPERIENCE

While obviously not comprehensive at this point, there is some concern in looking at the outcomes of previous research on mentoring for children of incarcerated parents in terms of the diminishing impact of the mentoring relationships over time. There were several studies noted here that found some good impacts in the shorter term (e.g., six months into the relationship) only to have those gains wash away as match lengths reached a year or longer. There are many potential reasons for this decline. As noted previously, these evaluations often had many missing participants toward the end of the study, rendering treatment/control comparisons invalid. Youth in the “control” group may have received other services, including mentoring from a different source. And one can imagine that if a significant number of participants were reunited with a released parent that it would impact the results of the evaluation.

But it’s also entirely possible that a mentor is a great short-term boost for children of incarcerated parents, but perhaps not much more. Mentors may be great for quickly offsetting the impact of having an incarcerated parent, a source of joy and stability in a trying time. But it may be that over time the needs of the family or the cumulative impact of the missing parent simply is more than one mentor can address. Clearly more research is needed before making any sweeping generalization about the ideal length of these matches, but it’s worth considering that for this population mentors are perhaps best used as a targeted, short-term form of support.

That begs the question of how programs can produce more long-term impact for children of incarcerated parents. One possible solution is to really emphasize more meaningful activities and engagement later in the relationship, giving mentors and youth an increasingly relevant and sophisticated set of activities to do together as the match ages. This issue might also be addressed by innovations in program design. Maybe a team approach offers more long-term mentoring viability, as a network of caring adults step in to support the child, rather than relying solely on one mentor. A youth-initiated mentoring approach might help identify additional mentors that can serve as a “hand off” when the initial match starts to decline. Programs should be creative in thinking about how to extend the impact of what may be, in spite of the desire for long-matches, a short-term intervention.


Learn More:
The full study, “Group Mentoring” is available on the National Mentoring Resource Center website. Read Now
This review examines the research evidence for mentoring programs that use a group format, in which one or more mentors is matched with a group of youth for a shared mentoring experience.

About the Review:
Each Mentoring Model/Population Review is conducted by the National Mentoring Resource Center Research Board with the intention of examining the full body of rigorous evidence as it pertains to either mentoring for a specific population of youth (e.g., youth with disabilities, immigrant youth) or a specific model of mentoring (e.g., group mentoring, e-mentoring). Each review is built around a thorough literature review for the topic in an attempt to answer key questions about mentoring’s effectiveness, participant characteristics and program processes that influence that effectiveness, and successful implementation of relevant programs to date.

Each Review also contains an “Implication for Practitioners” section that highlights steps programs can take to use or build on this evidence base. A draft version of each review and accompanying implications for practice is anonymously reviewed by at least one practitioner and one researcher who have expertise in the topic. A Research Board member serves as the coordinating editor for each review and makes final decisions regarding the acceptability of its content, prior to submission for final review and approval by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.