Melissa W. Radcliff is Executive Director of Our Children’s Place, a nonprofit agency committed to the children of incarcerated parents (http://ourchildrensplace.com/). You can reach Melissa at ourchildrensplace@gmail.com.
For many of us (and our children), the colorful characters of Sesame Street (who’s your favorite?) and their human companions helped us learn our numbers and letters in English and Spanish, taught us to be good friends, and encouraged us to use our imaginations, among other things.
In more recent years the folks at Sesame Street have addressed the difficult subjects of deployment, death, and bullying. Earlier this summer they added a new initiative, one addressing a topic that affects at least 21,000 children in our state: parental incarceration.
On a DVD that’s part of the Sesame Workshop tool kit (http://www.sesamestreet.org/parents/topicsandactivities/toolkits/incarce…), Alex, a new Muppet, shares a bit with his friends about his father being incarcerated.
According to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, in early March 5,124 inmates (4,629 male, 495 female) identified themselves as parents with a total of 21,507 minor children. When Our Children’s Place gives out that statistic at community events we always add a footnote because we know it’s more than likely low. It doesn’t include situations where an inmate doesn’t disclose having children (for a variety of reasons) or where a parent is in jail, another state system, or the federal system.
A 2010 Pew Research Center (www.pewresearch.org) report shows that 2.7 million children in the United States have at least one parent in prison or jail. That works out to 1 in 28 children.
And yet data collection is just one of many concerns when it comes to the issue of parental incarceration. Who is caring for these children? Where do they live? Are the caregivers being provided the support and resources they need?
What do the relationships between children and their incarcerated parents look like? Do the children know the truth? Is the incarceration a family secret, with shame and stigma attached? Are there people in children’s lives who support the relationship? How do we even define what the relationship looks like? Does it include visits, phone calls, letters? And what about those situations where it isn’t safe for children to have a relationship, where a court has said the parent can’t see his/her children? Is there someone in the children’s lives willing to explain the situation and answer difficult questions?
Are the people in a child’s life outside the family – teachers and school staff, faith community leaders, coaches, etc. – aware of the situation and able to offer support?
Someone pointed out just recently that we have developed a decent community response to the “3 Ds” in a child’s life – divorce, death, and deployment. Of course we
are continually fine tuning our responses as we learn more. But parental incarceration continues to be one of the issues ignored. As a result, children and families can feel overlooked, vulnerable, and without a voice.
If Alex and his Sesame Street friends can talk about this, then we as a community not only have permission to have the conversation at a local and state level here in North Carolina, we have a responsibility to do so.