Collaboration In Adolescents

Still, regardless of the fact that practitioners and researchers stress the importance of the positive correlations found between visitation and the child’s wellbeing, it is worth noting that such findings usually apply to mostly young children (aged 3 -11) (Eagle, 2013) with less literature exploring the views of teenagers, even though most adolescents find contact with their imprisoned mother extremely important (Brown et al 2002). Nevertheless the few researchers (Trice and Brewster 2004; Kierkus and Baer 2002) that have examined samples of adolescents found that low levels of visitation are directly linked to a predicted high level of engagement in criminal activities on behalf of the child. Therefore as previously argued, not only children

2004). Turanovic et al. (2012) argues that key factors that are often overlooked by the literature are the living conditions of the child and the mother-child relationship prior the mother’s imprisonment. In a study conducted by Plugge et al. (2006) it has been found that substance abuse and excess drinking are often encountered among the female prison population, 75% of 505 female admitting at using illicit drugs in the six months before their sentence and 42% admitting drinking alcohol in excess of Government guidelines prior to imprisonment’ (Plugge et al., 2006: 28). Therefore based on such figures it is argued that maternal separation can be seen as a positive outcome for the child in cases where mothers demonstrate anti-social behaviour or substance misuse prior to imprisonment (Murray 2015). Thus, in such occurrences maternal incarceration can actually have a positive impact on the child’s wellbeing as it can provide the child with a mean of relief from an abusing parenting style. What is more, such findings also suggest that studies’ results related to the appropriateness of contact between an incarcerated mother and her child cannot be generalised to all children with similar circumstances, as they heavily rely on the participants’ relationships with their

It is commonly cited that up to 30 per cent of prisoners’ children suffer mental health problems, compared to 10 per cent of the general population (Philbrick 1996) and more than half of them drop out of school before the age of 13 (Boswell and Wedge 2002). However various researchers (Casey-Acevedo and Bakken, 2002) argue that can be tackled through maintained parent-child contact at high levels throughout the mother’s imprisonment. From this view-point it is reasoned that visitation acts as a preventive factor for children with imprisoned mothers to develop mental health related problems while also decreasing the children’s probability to leave school at an early stage (Sharp and Marcus-Mendoza 2001). Such claims are in alignment with the results found in a study conducted by Trice and Brewster (2004) where adolescents with incarcerated mothers that were visiting their mother more often were associated with fewer instances of truancy and suspensions from school than those with fewer visits. Thus high levels of visitation can have positive long-term consequences on the child’s level of education; likewise adding onto the beneficial aspects of visitation for the child’s