Family and Community Resource Program

Research Synthesis

The research indicates that children who have healthy relationships with their incarcerated parents avoid some of the negative impacts of separation, resulting in happier, more successful, better-adjusted children. Frequent visitation can lead to several benefits, including higher scores on measures of well-being, IQ, emotional adjustment, and behavioral measures. Visitation produces beneficial effects for several reasons:

• Visits allow children to express their emotional reactions to the separation. The more disturbed children are by the separation, the more important it is that visitation occurs.
• Visitation helps parents to deal with separation and loss issues, increasing their ability to help their children deal with the same issues.
• Parent-child separation can cause irrational feelings and fears in children about their parents. Visits allow children to deal with those feelings and fears, and help them to form a more realistic understanding of their parents' circumstances.
• Visits allow parents to model appropriate interactions for children who react negatively to the separation.
• Visits allow parents and children to maintain their existing relationship, which leads to more successful reunification after incarceration.

Enhanced visitation programs address the need for extended physical contact between children and their parents. Traditional visitation settings allow only a minimal amount of physical contact, and are extremely restrictive for children who are accustomed to intensive, repeated physical interaction with their parents. In contrast, enhanced visitation programs allow children and their parents to interact more closely in child-oriented environments, which reduces the amount of stress experienced by parents and children during visitation.

These programs provide more flexible visiting schedules, play areas with toys and activities, and longer, more meaningful contact times. Such programs view visitation as a beneficial, low-cost intervention that ameliorates the negative impacts of separation. Frequent visitation in a non-threatening environment can lead to improvements in parent-child relationships, which, in turn, can play a key role in children's future development and may lead to reductions in anti-social behavior and increases in self-esteem among the children of incarcerated parents.