Michael de Laine

Children suffer when mother winds up in prison

By Michael de Laine, Copenhagen, 26 February 2009

Children whose mothers are sent to prison suffer emotionally long after they are separated, Swedish research indicates.

Children are affected emotionally when their mothers are sent to prison.

According to Anneli Björkhagen Turesson, a doctoral candidate in social work at Malmö University’s Faculty of Health and Society, half of a group of children that she studied in connection with her PhD thesis were suffering emotionally a full year after they were separated from their mothers.

“This is primarily due to the fact that the children have faced authorities that lack a child perspective and downplay their need of support and help,” Turesson says. “Children are invisible to the authorities even though they suffer serious consequences when their mothers are sentenced to prison.”

In her thesis, ‘Mother in Prison - Mothers’ and Children’s Stories: An Analysis of Young People’s Process of Resilience’, she studies children’s capacity to recover.

Turesson’s study shows that some of the children have had to move and that several were left alone at home without support after the police arrested their mother. In one case, an innocent adolescent was placed in jail in connection with his mother’s arrest.

But the study also shows that stress and strains are not only bad - in some cases they have entailed development and an improved ability to cope with difficulties later in life. Through an analysis of mothers’ and children’s stories Turesson has identified key processes that have a positive effect on children’s ability to bounce back.

“I have seen how important it is that the child feels loved and has a chance to maintain continual contact with the mother during childhood and adolescence,” she says. “Children who had these needs satisfied have a greater capacity for dealing with stress and difficulty. This shows how important it is that children have this possibility of staying in continual contact with their mother while she serves her time. This is also a right that they have under the Declaration of Children’s Rights.”

The majority of the children come from broken families, but most of the fathers are in the picture in some way or another. Two children come from nuclear families, where the fathers have looked after the children while the mothers served their sentences. Other children were not looked after by their father while the mother was in prison. None of the mothers has sole custody.

The study also shows that maternal grandparents play an important role in many families. Through their support for the family, they have been able to mitigate some of the negative effects that substance abuse and criminality have had on the children.

Also evident from the study is that those who have had an economic buffer have coped with the situation better, since the children were able to keep living at home while their mothers were in prison.

The majority of the children have functioned well in school and in their leisure time. One contributory factor may be that most of the mothers have tried to encourage their children to participate in activities that promote good social adaptation.

“They have wanted their children to choose different paths in life than they themselves did,” Turesson says.