Fink! Still at Large: A Study of Children with Incarcerated Parents Suggests That Teachers Can Be a Powerful Source of Stigmatization. How Would You Help a Child in This Situation in Psychotherapy?

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Recently a man sitting across from me at a banquet table said, "I know you; you're the doctor who taught me that children need love and praise." His comment, which I surmised was based on a lecture I had given months before, surprised me. Nonetheless, I was proud that the message had made an impression on him.

I thought of this when I read the paper referred to in this month's question. The paper analyzes the way in which teachers react to elementary school students who have a parent in jail. The researchers, affiliated with the College of William & Mary and the Virginia Consortium Program in Clinical Psychology, both in Williamsburg, conducted two studies. The first focused on the experiences of 30 teachers with children who had incarcerated parents. The second, which involved 73 teachers, examined their expectations for competency of fictitious children who were new to class because their mothers had been incarcerated (J. Appl. Dev. Psychol. 2010;31:281-90 [doi:10.1016/j.appdev.2010.04.001]).

The findings devastated me because they showed that teachers make assumptions about their students' academic potential based on one part of the narrative. As I've mentioned previously, one of the most important bodies of work on the impact of adverse events on the lives of children is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. This study of 17,000 people, a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control …