| The Impacts of Enhanced Visitation Programs
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: |
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- 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.
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