WORKING WITH CHILDREN OF INCARCERATED PARENTS

Working with Children of Incarcerated Parents

Kim Pareso

The Rosemont Center, Inc

2440 Dawnlight Ave

Columbus OH 43211

614-471-2626

www.rosemont.org

More than 1.9 million children in this country have a parent in prison and many more have experienced the incarceration of a parent in their lives. As a result of parental incarceration these children have endured much chaos in their lives. These children experience problems in school, substance abuse, gangs and delinquency. This workshop will look at this ever-growing population and discuss how it has impacted the systems in which we work.

The objectives of this workshop are:

To begin to define what is the problem and look at the statistics
To increase our awareness that the impact of parental incarceration has on children
To discuss the challenges and opportunities this population gives our systems
To gain awareness on how to protect our children when a parent is incarcerated
To gain an understanding in the variety of ways children may react
To gain an understanding of "high risk" indicators for PTSD
To gain an understanding of the stages of traumatic stress management
To help determine what role we as care givers can play in each stage to help our children cope with an incarcerated parent

We won't leave with all the answers to this problem but hopefully through gaining a better understanding of it we can work to help our children not get caught up in the chaos.

We cannot stop this from being traumatic for our children but by understanding how traumatic stress develops into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder we can cut them off at the pass.

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