Coping With Confinement

Abstract

Theory and research suggest that parental incarceration is often a significant source of stress for children and adolescents. Understanding how young people navigate the stressors of parental incarceration can shed important light on well-being and inform intervention efforts, but little research exists on the coping strategies that young people use during and after a parent’s incarceration. Through in-depth interviews, this study explores how adolescents (n = 10) cope with parental incarceration. Results suggest that most adolescents use some combination of three strategies: deidentification from the incarcerated parent, desensitization to incarceration, and strength through control. Results reveal variability in how young people cope with parental incarceration, and underscore the importance of future research on the implications of different strategies for well-being.

Keywords

parental incarceration parents in prison coping adolescents youth perspectives

One of many consequences of the United States’ heavy reliance on incarceration over the last several decades is that a substantial number of American children have spent portions of their youths with a parent behind bars. In 2008, the year for which national data are most recently available, inmates in America’s prisons and jails were parents to an estimated 2.7 million children under the age of 18 (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010). To put these numbers in historical perspective, 1 in every 28 American children had a parent in prison in 2008, compared with only 1 in every 125 children 25 years ago (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010). Changes in criminal justice policies and practices dating back to the 1970s, particularly those related to sentencing, coupled with major declines in urban employment prospects are thought to have driven the dramatic increase in incarceration that occurred during the 1980s and 1990s and disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minority men and their families (Western & Wildeman, 2009). Indeed, recent estimates suggest that 11.4% of Black children have an incarcerated parent, compared with 1.8% of White children (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010).

Researchers have documented a number of negative outcomes among inmates’ children including anxiety and depressive symptoms (Kampfner, 1995; Murray & Farrington, 2008; Wilbur et al., 2007), aggressive behavior (Geller, Cooper, Garfinkel, Schwartz-Soicher, & Mincy, 2012; Sharp & Marcus-Mendoza, 2001; Wildeman, 2010), delinquency and involvement in criminal activities (Huebner & Gustafson, 2007; Kjellstrand & Eddy, 2011; Murray, Janson, & Farrington, 2007; Murray, Loeber, & Pardini, 2012), and school-related problems (Cho, 2011; Hanlon et al., 2005; Stanton, 1980). Although important questions remain about if and how parental incarceration affects well-being above and beyond the effects of other ecological adversities to which children are often exposed (e.g., Johnson & Easterling, 2012; Murray, Farrington, Sekol, & Olsen, 2009), there is wide agreement that parental incarceration constitutes a source of stress for children (Dallaire, Ciccone, & Wilson, 2012; Foster & Hagan, 2013; Murray et al., 2012).

Children encounter stress at various junctures, and there is evidence that many children are first exposed to the stressors of having a parent involved with the criminal justice system when their parents are arrested in their presence (Dallaire & Wilson, 2010; Phillips & Zhao, 2010). Research suggests that witnessing a parent’s arrest is a deeply stressful experience that can have lasting implications for children’s emotional well-being (Dallaire & Wilson, 2010; Fishman, 1983; Kampfner, 1995; Phillips & Zhao, 2010). Stress exposure often continues during the incarceration period, with many children experiencing disruptions in caregiving relationships (Murray & Murray, 2010; Parke & Clarke-Stewart, 2003), economic and residential instability (Geller, Garfinkel, Cooper, & Mincy, 2009; Phillips, Erkanli, Keeler, Costello, & Angold, 2006; Sack, Seidler, & Thomas, 1976), social stigma and pressure to keep the incarceration a secret (Braman, 2004; Johnston, 1995; Lowenstein, 1986), and the ambiguity of having a parent that is psychologically present but physically absent (Bocknek, Sanderson, & Britner, 2009). Research also suggests that children are often keenly aware of the stressors that parents and caregivers experience during the incarceration period (Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008; Yocum & Nath, 2011). Although we know very little about what the reentry period is like for children, there is evidence that children often have conflicting feelings about parents returning home (Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008) and that it is an emotionally challenging time for returning prisoners and the adult family members who support their reintegration (Few-Demo & Arditti, 2014; Naser & Visher, 2006).

The adolescent stress and coping literature suggests that the ways in which young people navigate these stressors will have important implications for their emotional and psychological well-being (Compas, Connor-Smith, Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001; Compas & Reeslund, 2009). Broadly speaking, “coping refers to the ways that an individual attempts to manage and adapt to stress” (Compas & Reeslund, 2009, p. 573). Coping encompasses efforts to regulate thoughts, feelings, behaviors, physiological responses, and environmental circumstances (Compas et al., 2001), but research with adolescents suggests that some of these strategies may be more adaptive than others. In general, primary and secondary control strategies tend to be associated with better outcomes than disengagement or avoidance strategies; however, research also suggests that whether or not the stressor is perceived as controllable is an important consideration (Compas et al., 2001). Primary control strategies, which involve efforts to either modulate the stressor or the emotions that accompany it, are associated with better outcomes when individuals are faced with controllable events or situations, whereas secondary control strategies, which involve efforts toward “maximizing one’s fit to current conditions” through acceptance and distraction or cognitive restructuring, are more adaptive in uncontrollable situations (Compas & Reeslund, 2009, p. 575).

Despite a growing interest in factors that promote positive outcomes among children with incarcerated parents (e.g., Miller, 2007; Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008), very little empirical research exists on how young people cope with the stressors they experience during and after a parent’s incarceration. In one of only two studies to report data on coping among children with incarcerated parents that we are aware of, Bocknek et al. (2009) conducted semi-structured interviews with 35 children in 1st through 10th grades who had a relative in prison. Interviews touched on a variety of topics including family relationships, knowledge about the family member’s criminality and conditions of confinement, and coping. The authors reported that children used a variety of strategies to cope with their feelings about the incarceration of a family member. Although the authors did not describe the range of strategies that children employed, they did note that children “overwhelmingly reported avoidance of others and of their feelings” (p. 328). Themes related to coping also emerged from Nesmith and Ruhland’s (2008) qualitative study of children between the ages of 8 and 17 with an incarcerated parent. Results indicated that all children experienced stress related to parental incarceration, but that an “impressive” number of them “found healthy outlets for their feelings or creative coping mechanisms to get them through hard times” (p. 1127). The authors report that children typically coped by getting involved in extracurricular activities such as sports and church, and that these activities gave young people the opportunity to build confidence, express negative emotions, and form new friendships.

Despite the fact that both studies seem to suggest that children and adolescents typically use avoidance or distraction strategies, the authors arrived at different conclusions about how young people cope with the incarceration of a family member. Bocknek et al. (2009) characterized children’s coping strategies as “ineffective” (p. 330), whereas Nesmith and Ruhland (2008) described children as “resourceful” (p. 1129). Part of this disparity may reflect the different compositions of the samples in terms of age and participants’ relationships to their incarcerated family members, as well as the extent to which coping was a central focus. Additionally, this discrepancy may reflect the fact that there is variability in how children cope with parental incarceration that was not adequately captured or described in either study. Given the dearth of studies on coping and the conflicting results of the two studies that have been conducted with children of incarcerated parents, additional research on the subject is warranted. The purpose of the current study is to explore and identify the range of coping strategies that young people use during and after a parent’s incarceration.

Method

Participants

Participants were recruited through a community-based program that facilitates mentoring of children with incarcerated parents in the southeastern United States. Families with at least one child between the ages of 11 and 17 enrolled in the program were sent information packets about the study. Recruitment materials were mailed to 71 families, and 15 signed sets of parent consent and youth assent forms were returned to the researchers. Two of the youth who provided assent and had a parent or caregiver consent were scheduled for the study but did not ultimately participate for reasons that are unknown to the researchers. An additional two youth reported that, although they had several family members incarcerated at the time of the interview, they did not have any experience with parental incarceration. These two participants were therefore excluded from the current study, as was one participant who reported that her father had been incarcerated, but did not otherwise discuss her father or her relationship with him.

The final sample for the current study consisted of 10 adolescents who ranged in age from 11 to 16 ( $\bar{X}$ = 13.1). The sample was comprised primarily of females (60%) and adolescents who described their race-ethnicity as either exclusively Black or African American or Black/African American and at least one Other race-ethnicity (Table 1). Six participants had a parent who was currently incarcerated, two participants had parents who were released within 6 months of the interview, and two participants had parents who were released within 1 year of the interview. At the time of the interview, four participants lived with their mother, five participants lived with a grandparent or grandparents, and one participant lived with an adoptive family.

Table 1.

Description of Participants.

Pseudonym	Sex	Race^a	Sex of incarcerated parent	Lived with parent immediately prior to incarceration	Current caregiver
Alexandra	F	Black, White	Father	No	Grandparents
Jordan	M	Black, White, Asian	Father	No	Grandparents
Christopher	M	Black	Mother	No	Grandparent
James	M	Black	Mother	No	Grandparent
Brianna	F	White	Father	No	Mother
Chloe	F	“Mixed”; Black, White	Adopted father	No	Grandparents
Hannah	F	“Mixed”; Black, Indian	Father	No	Mother
David	M	African American	Father	No	Mother
Jasmine	F	Black, Native American	Mother and father	Mother: Yes; father: No	Adoptive parents
Kayla	F	Black	Social father	Yes	Mother

Actual terms used by participants.

Interviews

Semi-structured interviews were conducted by the first author and were designed to tap into personal characteristics, family relationships, experiences with parental incarceration, and expectations for parental reentry from prison. Each interview commenced with basic demographic questions (e.g., “How old are you?” “What grade are you in?”), followed by a “concentric circles” activity that was intended to help participants feel more comfortable and to gather information about family relationships. Participants were asked to draw a circle on a piece of paper and instructed to imagine that the circle represents the people in their lives that are most important to them or that they consider themselves closest to. After indicating who they would put in that circle, they were asked to draw a second circle around the first circle and imagine that the new circle represented people that they were close to, but not quite as close to as the people they put in the first circle. The interview then progressed to questions about having an incarcerated parent (e.g., “How would you describe your relationship with your incarcerated parent?” “Can you tell me about a time that you spoke to or visited your incarcerated parent?”).

The manner in which interviews were conducted was informed by the phenomenological approach (Pollio, Henley, & Thompson, 1997). Phenomenological interviews are designed to “attain a first-person description of some specified domain of experience, with the course of the dialogue largely set by the respondent” (Pollio et al., 1997, pp. 29-30). Interview questions were therefore designed to elicit firsthand knowledge of the experience of parental incarceration, and the pace and tone of the interviews were set by the participants. Participants were allowed to speak freely, with prompts encouraging the participants to discuss their personal experiences. Our aim was to facilitate a collaborative communication process (see Ellis, Kiesinger, & Tillmann-Healy, 1997) that permitted an in-depth understanding of sensitive and emotional topics to emerge through interaction and dialogue. Following this biographical-interpretive method, we chose to avoid “why” questions in favor of a focus on eliciting “how” (see Holloway & Jefferson, 2000) participants experienced parental incarceration and, in some cases, parental reentry from prison.

Interviews were conducted in a University laboratory space to standardize the interview setting and to help protect the confidentiality of participants’ responses. Given the unfamiliar setting, great care was taken to ensure that participants and the family members who accompanied them to the laboratory felt as comfortable as possible. To this end, families were greeted by the first author/interviewer, an assistant professor from a working class background who has extensive experience working with children and families in a variety of social service and community settings. She greeted families in the parking lot, escorted them into the building, offered everyone beverages and snacks, and spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with caregivers and children before inviting the participant into a separate interview room that was located just around the corner from the family waiting area. The interviewer’s pre-interview interactions with family members included a variety of activities, including holding babies while caregivers went to the bathroom, playing “hang man,” and helping to get younger siblings engaged in activities such as coloring and reading books.

At the beginning of each adolescent interview, the interviewer reminded participants that she was interested in learning more about the experiences of young people who have a family member in jail or prison and asked them to affirm their continued interest in participating in the study and to being audio-taped. Participants were reminded that they did not have to answer any questions that they did not want to, that they could stop the study at any time, and that they would still receive their gift card even if they decided not to participate or if they changed their mind during the course of the interview. She then started the interview by asking participants to describe themselves, taking several minutes to engage in light-hearted discussions with participants about their interests and favorite activities. When participants seemed to be ready to move on, the interviewer then introduced the “concentric circles” activity described above. This activity was designed to not only obtain a sense of family relationships but also help ease participants into the interview and to establish rapport. All participants received a US$15 gift card for a discount retail chain for their participation, as well as a list of local resources.

Interviews ranged in length from 22 to 49 minutes, with an average length of 35 minutes. Digital audio-recordings of interviews were transcribed by a trained research assistant and then carefully reviewed and checked for accuracy. While listening to the audio-files to check the transcriptions, the interviewer also expanded her field notes. Transcribed interviews and field notes were then carefully reviewed and coded for themes using an open-coding process. In our analyses, we aspired to Fetterman’s (2010) ideal of “telling a credible, rigorous, and authentic story . . . [that] gives voice to people in their own local context” (p. 1). Before coding began, the two authors talked, in-depth, about the interviews themselves and the experience of the interviews for the first author as a way to enhance the quality of the findings by exploring various sources of information (see Fetterman, 2010). In addition to discussions about the interviews and the raw material from the interview transcripts and field notes, we explored previous literature not only on children with incarcerated parents but also on adolescent coping in general. The second author took the lead role in the formal coding process, working closely with the first author to ensure agreement and accuracy of each code and evidence to support each theme. Initially, the broad theme of coping was identified. As coding progressed, consistencies emerged and three categories of coping were highlighted: deidentification from the incarcerated parent, desensitization to incarceration, and strength through control. Once these three main themes were identified, transcripts and field notes were further explored by both authors in a collaborative process to thematically organize findings and to provide specific evidence and quotes. Most participants, who are discussed using pseudonyms, utilized more than one coping strategy (Table 2). Pseudonyms were chosen via a popular web site for new and expecting parents, www.babycenter.com. As most of the participants included Black or African American in their descriptions of race-ethnicity, we searched for popular African American names from the early 2000s and selected names from that list.

Table 2.

Summary of Coping Strategies Employed by Participants.

	Deidentification	Desensitization	Strength through control
Alexandra	X		X
Jordan	X		X
Christopher	X
James	X	X	X
Brianna	X	X	X
Chloe		X	X
Hannah		X	X
David	X	X
Jasmine	X	X	X
Kayla		X	X

Findings

Deidentification From the Incarcerated Parent

The majority of our participants (Alexandra, Jordan, Christopher, James, Brianna, David, and Jasmine) suggested some degree of deidentification from their incarcerated parents. What we termed deidentification may be thought of as an avoidant strategy, as participants appeared to distance themselves from their incarcerated parents and, thus, from sources of stress and stigma in their lives. During the concentric circles exercise (see “Method” section), only three participants included their incarcerated parent in their innermost circle. Three participants included their parents in outer circles, and four did not include their incarcerated parents in any of the circles. Placing incarcerated parents in an outer circle or not including them at all suggests a lack of perceived closeness to their incarcerated parents. Moreover, as interviews progressed, participants cited multiple ways they actively tried to distance themselves from their incarcerated parents. In most cases, the participants deidentified from the parents themselves. However, one participant suggested closeness with his incarcerated parent as a person, but deidentified from the incarceration of his parent. In this section, we provide examples of deidentification and also discuss an additional sub-category of this theme: citing other parental figures.

Three participants (Jordan, Brianna, and Jasmine) noted specific ways of deidentifying from their incarcerated parents. One strategy involved opting not to discuss the incarcerated parent. Jordan preferred not to talk about his incarcerated father or his father’s incarceration, despite attempts from the interviewer to engage him in discussion of his experiences related to parental incarceration. The interviewer specifically asked about discussing the situation about his father being in prison:

Interviewer:

So do you want to talk a little bit more about your dad?

Jordan:

Hmm-mmm. I’m done with it.

Interviewer:

You are done talking about him? Ok well, this isn’t directly about your dad, this is about having a dad in prison. Are you okay with those questions or no?

Jordan:

No, not really. No. I don’t wanna talk about that.

The interviewer recognized his wishes to not discuss his father and respected those wishes by moving on to a different topic. Jordan would discuss his family, his school life, and his personal life, but communicated that he did not like to talk about his father. The interviewer’s field notes suggested that he seemed comfortable talking about his family in general, but was uncomfortable talking about his father. Toward the end of the interview when he offered information about his dad, for example, she noted that he had his arms up on the table and was rapidly moving the upper part of his body across the table and avoiding eye contact.

Other participants were more willing to talk about their incarcerated parent and explicitly described the ways in which they distanced themselves from their parents. For example, Brianna discussed how she did not want others to associate her with her incarcerated father, as she herself did not feel close to him. She noted “I don’t wanna have the same last name as he does . . . I definitely want my last name changed.” She even referred to him as being “like some stranger.” In a similar fashion, Jasmine had legally changed her first, middle, and last name. She was very proud of this deidentification as it served to create distance between herself and her incarcerated parents. She had recently been adopted and her biological family was unaware of her name change. She did not want her biological family (her biological mother had been incarcerated but released and her biological father was still in prison) to know of her adoption, her name change, or where she lived. She cited this as one reason she would not write letters to her father: “I won’t write him ’cause I don’t want them [her biological father’s family] to have my address and then he’ll tell my [paternal] Granny and then my Granny will come over and . . . We live in, like, a private area.” She said she currently wanted no contact with her biological family as she prefers to “get on with her life,” which she feels like she cannot do if she maintains connections with them.

David deidentified from his father’s incarceration, but he still identified with his father as a person. We view his active avoidance of discussing his father’s incarceration as suggestive of deidentification. Although he still identified with his father (even putting his father in his innermost circle during the concentric circle activity), he opted not to discuss his father’s incarceration. One possible interpretation of this is that identifying with his father without the context of prison helps him cope by not having to face the harsh reality of his father’s incarceration. Field notes illuminate this possibility: “[This participant] said he didn’t care when his dad went away, but it seems like he did—is this maybe some sort of defense mechanism?”

Christopher also deidentified with his mother during her incarceration period, though he was much more vague in his description of this process than other participants. He did not describe an active process of separating himself from her. Instead, it seemed, the deidentification just naturally happened as his memories of her faded while she was not present in his daily life. He recalls his mother’s arrest in detail, but not much else about her before that time. He has lived, and continues to live, with his grandmother. He said he felt “wounded” by his mother’s incarceration, and that he felt both “happy and sad” when she returned from prison. When the interviewer prompted him to elaborate on these feelings, he said “Like, like I ’bout forgot her.” Although he deidentified with his mother while she was incarcerated, he went on to describe how he tried to build a relationship with her when she came home, suggesting that deidentification may have been a temporary solution to the stressors and negative emotions he experienced during the incarceration period.

Other parental figures

Four participants (Alexandra, James, Brianna, and Jasmine) cited other parental figures and discussed the integral roles that these individuals played in their daily lives, including taking on parental roles in the daily lives of our participants. We find this to be a sub-category of deidentification: Participants not only deidentified from the incarcerated parent but also identified with another person as a parental figure and as somewhat of a “replacement” in fulfilling parental roles.

Alexandra discussed her grandmother as her main caregiver, describing her as a parental figure who she loves and wants to support in return for all of her care. She detailed her transformation to being grateful for how her grandmother took care of her and accepted her. She said, “I’m more grateful and less selfish than I was.” She recounted how her grandmother fulfilled a primary parenting role when neither of her biological parents were available, which transformed her into the more grateful person she has become.

Interviewer:

So when you say that you’re grateful for what she’s done for you guys, what do you mean by that?

Alexandra:

Well, she’s . . . my mom wasn’t ready to be a mom when she had us so like we lived with our grandmother since we were like babies. And, like, yeah, I’m grateful for that cause . . . Like, I dunno where we’d have been if she hadn’t took us or like got us.

In a similar fashion, James noted his “Nana” was the one who was always there for him. He noted,

My Nana’s nice. She has took, she has taken care of me for like most of my, well, all of my life, and I thank her for that and I appreciate her for getting me because if I was with my mom then they would take me away and then they would put me with someone else because she has went to jail.

Brianna also described a grandparent, her “Pawpaw,” as her primary parental figure. She said, “I’m still really close to my Pawpaw and I’m his favorite and he’s my favorite so I call my Pawpaw my father because he is. He is my best friend and I love my Pawpaw.” Jasmine not only had adoptive parents who had completely replaced her biological family in her eyes but also discussed a caseworker she had worked with previously, when she entered foster care but before she moved in with what would become her adoptive family. She even talks of loving this caseworker and how the caseworker would come and visit her even when she was not in “custody.” Although she had a new caseworker, Jasmine continued to exchange letters with her former caseworker and described her as an influential person who helped her cope with her parents’ incarcerations.

Desensitization to Incarceration

We borrow the definition of desensitization from Campbell, O’Brien, Van Boven, Schwarz, and Ubel (2014): “the general psychological process by which a person’s original specific emotive response (e.g. fear, shock, joy) becomes less intense over time or across repeated exposure” (p. 273). Although we could not gauge the psychological process per se in our interviews, we were able to explore the lack of intensity in responses to parental incarceration of our participants. In other words, desensitization in our findings is indicative of attempts to control what could be potentially negative psychological responses to having a parent who is incarcerated by normalizing or minimizing the situation. Participants suggested that this desensitization was a way of coping with their situations because it was “not a big deal,” thus, minimizing the gravity of having an incarcerated parent. Thus, we interpret this to be a primary control strategy (see Compas & Reeslund, 2009) as participants were working to modulate the potentially negative emotions that accompany the stressor of having an incarcerated parent. Seven participants (James, Brianna, Chloe, Hannah, David, Jasmine, Kayla) communicated desensitization to parental incarceration.

Brianna and Jasmine both said they did not care that their parents were incarcerated. For Brianna, her father had been incarcerated twice, though he had recently been released. She noted that, since she had been through it before, she did not care. She even said, “He can go back there [to prison] and stay there.” She felt he continued to make mistakes when he was not incarcerated, so she would prefer him to be in prison, suggesting that she was desensitized to the experience of having a parent in prison. Jasmine shared similar sentiments, having experienced the incarceration of both of her biological parents. She normalized her biological parents’ prolonged incarcerations and suggested that she did not care if they were in or out of prison, because, either way, she was not planning to have contact with them anytime in the near future. Still, the interviewer probed to find out Jasmine’s perspective on her biological parents’ incarcerations. Jasmine suggested the length of time her parents had been incarcerated desensitized her to the overall experience.

Interviewer:

Did you live with your biological mom or dad at some point?

Jasmine:

Never my dad. My dad went to jail when I was 2 years old and I, um, I think 2 years old so I never really knew who he is. I just know him by talking to him on the phone . . . and pictures or something. And I lived with my mom up until I was about 7 or 8.

She went on to recount multiple moves among family and foster parents, working with caseworkers, and finally being adopted by her current family where she feels like she has real parental support for the first time in her life. She discussed this matter of factly, explaining how she would distance herself from her father, even though her paternal grandmother tried to encourage her to have a relationship with him. Jasmine was not interested in developing a relationship with her father and did not think he would be coming home for many years, but still tried to appease her grandmother. In the context of telling the interviewer that her father felt like a stranger, Jasmine provided an example of how she “played along” with her grandmother:

But my granny sits down and talks to me and was like, “you know your dad loves you” and such and such, “he’ll be out soon.” My granny think he’s getting out. I’m like, “he ain’t never getting out” and stuff and she like, “I know but I’mma keep praying and praying.” It’s like, okay, I’ll pray with you but then whatever happens happens.

Kayla also communicated indifference to her father’s incarceration because he and other family members had been in multiple times before. Her social dad was currently incarcerated and she discussed the normalcy of him being in and out of jail multiple times, laughing she told the interviewer, “He’s been in and out 3 or 4 times.” Chloe also implied indifference about her adopted father’s incarceration but said the reason was because she did not live with him prior to the incarceration. When the interviewer asked her what it was like to have a father in prison, she said, “It doesn’t really bother me.”

James, Hannah, David, and Kayla exhibited desensitization by discussing the normalization of the incarceration process, as they had multiple family members who had been incarcerated. For example, Kayla discussed “a bunch of cousins” who had been in jail. When asked how many, she responded “probably about four or five of ’em,” and then laughed. She would laugh when she discussed the number of her cousins who had been in jail, saying they had been in “too many times.” The laughter was indicative of desensitization to this event. Field notes support this idea:

She seemed pretty indifferent about having “social dad” in prison, even though she lived with him before he went in . . . Laughed—and not in what I would call an uncomfortable laugh or a nervous laugh—when I asked if she knew anyone who had been in and about cycles in and out, got the sense it was more of an, “oh my family is so crazy” kind of laugh.

Unlike Brianna, Jasmine, and Kayla, some of the participants, like David and Hannah, still suggested that they were saddened by having an incarcerated parent, yet desensitized because they had seen it happen so many times; it was normal to have loved ones go to prison. They were desensitized to the experience of having an incarcerated parent, yet they still recognized the sadness it brought into their lives as the parent was absent.

Strength Through Control

Eight participants (Alexandra, Jordan, James, Brianna, Chloe, Hannah, Jasmine, and Kayla) discussed ways they found strength by maintaining some control over their lives. Below, we discuss ways in which participants found strength and control for themselves, including the sub-categories of controlling the parental relationship and helping others. We perceive this to be a secondary control strategy (see Compas & Reeslund, 2009) as participants suggested that they were working to improve their fit to the situation of parental incarceration through distraction. Although they could not control their parents’ incarcerations, they sought to find control in their lives through a variety of strategies.

Participants offered various examples of maintaining control over their own lives. Many of these examples are indicative of a search for strength. James suggested school as a way to better himself. He noted, “Well, I like being smart, you know, not trying to be dumb and stuff.” Hannah suggested that therapy had been helpful for her in that it allowed her to better control her thoughts about her father. After struggling with her relationship with her incarcerated father (who had begun to send her letters with “cuss words”) and trying to understand her mother’s relationship with her father and other men, she started going to therapy. Therapy also helped her learn to open up to others to help her deal with her situation. She noted,

I started talking back to him in therapy, too, and, um, my cousin next door to my mom started helping me out . . . She was telling me stuff like whatever he says just ignore it . . . ’Cause don’t let anything bring you down so you won’t be all sad in your life.

Hannah said that she also found strength in learning how to avoid letting her incarcerated parent “bring her down.” Instead, she found ways to be positive and make herself happy, regardless of the experience of having an incarcerated parent. Through these processes, she felt more in control of her thoughts surrounding her father and in her reactions to his incarceration.

Controlling the parental relationship

Two participants (Jasmine and Brianna) discussed personal strength in terms of exerting control in their relationships with their incarcerated parents. In addition to changing her name, Jasmine found strength by making the choice to avoid her biological parents, both of whom were either incarcerated at the time of the interview or recently released. She felt that her deliberate choice to get away from her family enabled her to be happy. She noted, “They don’t want me happy. They want me miserable all my life. And I’m not gonna’ be miserable all my life and so now I’ve made a change they… I guess they mad.” She noted that after she becomes an adult, gets a job, a home, and is paying bills on her own, she may try to get back in contact with her biological family. By that time, she says that she will be older, stronger, and wiser. She will be independent and not need the help of others. She says she wants to “get on track, get to where I am in successful mode” and then she may be able to handle a relationship with her biological family, but for now, she says they bring her down and she feels stronger by controlling her life and her happiness by limiting contact until she feels she can better handle those relationships. She maintained control over when this would happen and was confident that any future relationships with her parents would be on her terms.

Brianna also felt strengthened by taking control over her relationship with her incarcerated father. She was very open with her father, telling him her thoughts. She shared some of her conversations with her dad: “You know, I don’t know you. You’re, technically, you’re not my dad. Just ’cause you donated your sperm to my mom, don’t make you my dad, you know . . . You’re not gonna’ tell me what to do or anything.” When asked what it was like for her to be able to say that to him, she responded, “It felt good,” suggesting she derived a sense of satisfaction and strength from telling her father how she felt about him. She went on to suggest her sense of empowerment and control by noting,

If he was to walk through this door right now, I would tell him that I never want to see him again, to don’t ever call me, when you go back to jail don’t write me and lose the number, don’t try to get information on me, just leave me alone.

As discussed previously, Brianna deidentified with her father. The deidentification was not only a coping mechanism in and of itself, it also served to facilitate or complement a strategy of empowerment.

Helping others

A recurring theme in discussions of strength through control was helping others. Four participants (Jordan, James, Jasmine, and Kayla) specifically discussed how control and personal strength could be used to help others. We find this suggestive of strength through control in the sense that they sought to influence others by sharing their experiences. Jordan and James both described how rapping gave them an outlet for their feelings and a forum for helping others. Additionally, Jordan shared how he wanted to rap to inspire younger kids to be good and to stay away from drugs. He also felt that dancing was a good way to inspire himself and his younger family members because, “you get to get up and not being lazy like you just get to get up and do your thing.” Jordan also wanted to help people through rapping, but he also had much higher expectations for his life and helping people. When asked what he wants to be when he grow up, he said president or in the military. He wants to serve his country. Jasmine and Kayla were also interested in helping others, particularly children, though through different modes than rapping. Jasmine would like to work with children and/or in a hospital. And Kayla specifically said she wanted to work with children in a medical setting. These methods of coping suggest that participants find inner strength and then use that strength to inspire or help others.

Discussion

Previous theory and research suggest that parental incarceration is often a significant source of stress for children and adolescents (e.g., Dallaire et al., 2012; Foster & Hagan, 2013; Murray et al., 2012). Understanding how young people navigate the stressors of parental incarceration can shed important light on well-being and inform intervention efforts, but little research exists on the coping strategies that young people use during and after a parent’s incarceration. Through semi-structured interviews, the current study explored adolescents’ experiences with parental incarceration and the strategies they use to cope with parental confinement. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts suggests that adolescents generally use some combination of three strategies: deidentification with the incarcerated parent, desensitization to incarceration, and strength through control.

Results are consistent with previous research, but also enhance our understanding of coping by suggesting important variability in the strategies that youth employ. The two previous studies that have provided data on coping have indicated that children and adolescents often use what might be categorized as avoidance or distraction strategies to cope with parental incarceration (Bocknek et al., 2009; Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008). Results of the current study not only provide additional evidence of avoidance and distraction strategies but also suggest that some youth attempt to manage the stress and negative affect associated with parental incarceration by attempting to exert control in their relationships with their parents. In the parlance of the adolescent stress and coping literature (see Compas & Reeslund, 2009), this suggests that some adolescents use avoidant strategies (deidentification), whereas others use engagement strategies (desensitization and strength through control). Specifically, we interpret desensitization to be a primary control strategy as participants suggest they have some control over their perception of their parents’ incarceration and, thus, their emotional response to it. We view seeking strength through control as consistent with a secondary control strategy as participants recognize their parents’ incarceration is out of their control, yet work to find other ways to accept the situation and/or to exert control their lives. This gives them a sense of strength and purpose.

Primary and secondary control strategies tend to be associated with better outcomes in adolescents than disengagement or avoidance strategies, but whether or not the stressor is perceived as controllable is an important moderator (Compas et al., 2001). In general, research has suggested that primary control strategies, which involve efforts to either modulate the stressor or the emotions that accompany it, are associated with better outcomes when individuals are faced with controllable events or situations, whereas secondary control strategies, which involve trying to improve “one’s fit to current conditions” are more adaptive in uncontrollable situations (Compas & Reeslund, 2009, p. 575). Although parental incarceration itself is not something that children and adolescents can control, contact with incarcerated parents is something that adolescents may exert some control over and, indeed, some participants did attempt to regulate the frequency and nature of contact with their parents. This aspect of “strength through control” seems consistent with the notion of individual or psychological empowerment (Zimmerman, 2000). Based on what we know from the empowerment and adolescent stress and coping literatures, we cautiously speculate that youth who are able to exercise control over contact will likely fare better in the long run than those who disengage from the stressors associated with parental incarceration (Compas & Reeslund, 2009; Gullan, Power, & Leff, 2013; Zimmerman, 2000).

In the context of parental incarceration, deidentification may also be an adaptive strategy. We concur with other scholars who have argued that children with incarcerated parents may experience ambiguous loss (Arditti, 2012; Arditti, Lambert-Shute, & Joest, 2003; Bocknek et al., 2009; Krupat, 2007; La Vigne, Davies, & Brazzell, 2008), which is the uncertain loss a person feels when a family member is physically present but psychologically absent or psychologically present but physically absent (Boss, 1999, 2004, 2006). Central to Boss’s theory is the idea that the most important definition of family is the one that exists in the minds of individuals (Boss, 1999). To distance themselves from the loss of their incarcerated parent, many participants in our sample “substituted” another, more positive influence as a pseudo-family member while their parent was incarcerated (and even after). This, too, is in accordance with Boss’s (1999) suggestions for coping with ambiguous loss: revising relationships is necessary while letting go of the need for a precise definition of family. Although there is reason to believe that deidentification may be an adaptive response to ambiguous loss, it is ultimately an empirical question that has yet to be answered. In this general vein, more research is also needed on trajectories of ambiguous loss over time. Ambiguous loss is thought to have lasting implications for well-being (Boss, 1999, 2004, 2006), yet no work that we are aware of has considered if and how the experience of ambiguous loss changes developmentally or has explored whether different ways of coping with ambiguous loss are more beneficial for later well-being than others.

Exploring these questions in a larger and more diverse sample of adolescents would be particularly instructive. Although results of the current study are novel in revealing variability in how young people cope with parental incarceration and in suggesting evidence of what appears to be empowerment among a subset of youth, our sample was limited in several important ways. First, our findings are based on a small sample of youth who primarily experienced paternal incarceration and who were recruited from a community organization that facilitates mentoring of young people with incarcerated family members. This means that our findings do not well reflect the experiences of young people who have experienced maternal incarceration or young people who are not involved in mentoring relationships. Second, our sample was limited in terms of racial-ethnic diversity. All but one of our participants identified as either exclusively Black or African American or as Black/African American and at least one Other race-ethnicity. Although Black youth are also disproportionately represented in national samples of youth with incarcerated parents (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008; The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010; Western & Wildeman, 2009), this means that our findings also do not reflect the experiences of youth of other races and ethnicities. For a complex set of sociohistorical and structural reasons, the cultural, familial, and neighborhood contexts that African American children often develop in may pose additional risks to well-being (e.g., concentrated disadvantage), but also offer additional supports for adaptive coping (e.g., religiosity, collective responsibility for children; Barbarin, 1993; Miller, 2007; Miller & Bank, 2013) that should be further explored in future research. Third, the vast majority of our participants did not live with their incarcerated parents immediately prior to the parent’s incarceration and only six of our participants had a parent who was incarcerated at the time of the interview. Although we did not notice any obvious differences in the strategies used by youth whose parents were currently incarcerated and those whose parents had recently been released, the cross-sectional nature of our study rendered us unable to consider whether strategies changed as a function of where families are at in the incarceration process or whether children lived with parents prior to the parent’s incarceration. In addition to sample restrictions, the current study was also limited in that interviews were conducted at only a single point in time and were relatively brief in length. Multiple interview waves would have allowed us to ask follow-up questions and to explore topic raised by participants in more depth (Nesmith & Ruhland, 2008). Finally, because our focus was on how young people themselves make meaning related to incarceration, we did not solicit detailed information about participants’ backgrounds from either participants or their caregivers that would likely have provided important context to the findings.

A critical direction for future research is to explore and document factors that influence which coping strategies adolescents use. Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck (2007) suggest three categories of factors that may contribute to coping in general: temperament (e.g., temperamental reactivity and regulation), social relationships and contexts (e.g., availability of support, quality of social relationships), and underlying developmental changes (e.g., memory, cognition). In the case of parental incarceration, exposure to incarceration-specific risk experiences such as witnessing parental criminal activity or arrest (Dallaire, Zeman, & Thrash, 2014) and caregiving environments during incarceration (Cecil, McHale, Strozier, & Pietsch, 2008; Shlafer & Poehlmann, 2010) may be particularly important variables to consider in future research. Regarding development, we have speculated that youth who are able to exercise some control in their relationships with incarcerated parents may fare better in the long run than adolescents who disengage from stressors, but it is possible that this strategy may be constrained or enabled by basic developmental processes. By virtue of their greater autonomy and more sophisticated cognitive capacities, older adolescents may be better able to set the tone of their relationships with incarcerated parents than early adolescents or children. Indeed, the two participants who were able to exert control in their relationships were at the upper end of the age distribution in our sample. This raises interesting and important questions about how coping strategies vary by age and whether young children have different strategies at their disposal. Previous research indicates, for example, that older adolescents “become more selective about sources of support within different stressful situations,” “increasingly draw upon both behavioral and cognitive strategies,” and “are more self-reliant and can more intentionally monitor and modulate their own internal emotional states through positive self-talk and cognitive reframing” (Skinner & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2007, p. 132) than younger adolescents and children, suggesting that coping strategies likely change over time in ways that it would be instructive to explore and document using qualitative and quantitative designs.

Related to the need for developmental research that can investigate the relationship between coping strategies and well-being over time, an important direction for future research is to further explore the form and function of different constellations of coping strategies. All but one of the participants in our study used multiple strategies for coping with their parents’ incarcerations: Three participants used all three strategies, and six participants used two strategies. In addition to commonly using an avoidant strategy, our participants used both primary and secondary control strategies, often simultaneously. It may be that when young people are faced with multifaceted stressors like parental incarceration, they use different strategies to cope with different aspects of the stressor or at different points along the incarceration trajectory. Thus, they may attempt to reduce negative affect associated with the aspects they cannot control (e.g., the fact that the parent is incarcerated, how far away from home they are located, when they will be released), and attempt to bolster positive emotional experiences through aspects they can control or by attempting to help others. Greater understanding of which strategies are most beneficial and when would provide valuable information to service providers who work with children whose parents are incarcerated and, more generally, would shed new light on adolescent well-being in the context of accumulated adversity.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the young people who shared their stories with us, the family members, and caregivers who supported their participation in the study, and the community-based organization that helped us recruit participants. They are also grateful to Carla Garrett, Lily Heine, and Jennifer Zorotovich for their excellent research assistance and to Kathy Fitzgerald for helpful discussions about phenomenology and qualitative interviewing techniques.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Elizabeth I. Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research is focused on socioemotional well-being among adolescents and young adults, particularly in the context of parental incarceration and in relation to daily stress processes.

Beth A. Easterling is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Gallaudet University. Her research interests include the impact of incarceration on the family, gender and crime, and qualitative methodology.

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