EDUC 6163- Research that benefits Children and Families

This week I chose to look at Option 2 for this assignment.

My research question is: How do students fair later in life when one or more biological parents are incarcerated during their early years (birth-age5)?

I chose this research question because three out of my 11 students have one or more parents incarcerated. In these specific cases the students are being raised by their grandmothers.

After a little research on the topic of children of incarcerated parents i found that 1.7 million children under the age of 18 have incarcerated parents. I also learned that there has not been any real high quality research on the effect of parental incarceration due to effects that are in place before incarceration like, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and parental mental illness (Christian, 2009).

I am truly curious if there is a likely hood of children becoming incarcerated later in life when a parent was incarcerated in their early years. I am thinking the positive contributions of this research could be identifying those "at risk" children when they are young and providing those children and the families with related services such as counseling, support groups, and enrolling the children in a mentor/mentee program.






Christian, S. (2009) Children of incarcerated parents. National Conference of State Legsilature. March 2009.