Publication date: February 2016

Overview

This review examines research on mentoring for children of incarcerated parents. The review is organized around four questions:

1. What is the demonstrated effectiveness of mentoring for children of incarcerated parents?
2. What factors condition or shape the effectiveness of mentoring for this population?
3. What are the intervening processes that are most important in linking mentoring to outcomes for children of incarcerated parents?
4. To what extent have efforts to provide mentoring to this population reached and engaged targeted youth, been implemented with high quality, and been adopted and sustained by host organizations and settings?

Rigorous research on mentoring for children of incarcerated parents is scarce and only just starting to lay a foundation for understanding the impact of mentoring for this population. This research is even more limited with respect to clarifying the conditions and processes that may be required for optimizing benefits to youth. Combining the available evidence on mentoring children of incarcerated parents with the larger body of literature on the nature and experiences of this youth population, however, suggests a number of noteworthy possibilities with regard to each of the above questions. These include:

1. Program-arranged mentoring for the children of incarcerated parents has the potential to contribute to observable improvements in their behavior, relationships, and their emotional well-being.
2. Positive outcomes from mentoring may be more evident while the youth are actively engaged with their mentors, although sustaining the length of the mentoring relationship for the children of incarcerated parents is apparently difficult for programs.
3. The benefits of mentoring for this population may be influenced by the child’s capacity for trust and resilience, the strength of the relationship between the child and the incarcerated caregiver, and whether this person is the child’s biological parent.
4. Processes involving positive youth development, resilience and coping skills, and self-esteem may be instrumental as pathways through which mentoring is beneficial for children of incarcerated parents.
5. As with mentoring programs in general, and those serving higher-risk youth in particular, it is critically important to provide mentors with high-quality pre-match training and ongoing support from agency staff.

The review concludes with insights and recommendations for practice based on currently available knowledge. These recommendations include taking a “networked” approach to supporting the child with an emphasis on parent involvement, providing more robust mentor training, emphasizing youth development principles in relationship activities, and planning for extending these relationships or transitioning the youth from one mentor to another as a way of sustaining program impacts over longer periods of time.

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