It Motivated Me More Than It Crushed Me: Children of Incarcerated Parents in a Highly Selective University
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With over 2.7 million American children living with a parent absent to jail or prison, the rampancy of parental incarceration has become an insidious epidemic that disproportionately affects impoverished Black and Hispanic youth. While minimal research has examined these children at the elementary and secondary education levels, there has been no research to date about their experiences in institutions of higher education. In order to address this void and explore how educational systems can better adapt to the circumstances of parental incarceration to facilitate student achievement, this study employed a semi-structured, qualitative research design to examine the perceptions of twelve students with histories of parental incarceration at a highly selective university. Results suggest that the majority of the participants 1. perceived their parents’ incarceration as the impetus for their educational performance; 2. demonstrated an independence that has led to social isolation within educational environments; and 3. used their experiences with parental incarceration and its symptomatic adversities to inform their social impact career aspirations. This study suggests that these students’ narratives and their successes should not be used as models for other children of the incarcerated to strive for. Rather, the analysis reveals what exactly was burdened by these participants in order for them to attain academic excellence and how those burdens can be structurally displaced onto educational institutions. Finally, to begin to rectify the intergenerational effects of parental incarceration, this study suggests that there must be a commitment to addressing the historical sentiment, pervasive in the bedrock of American democracy, that deems poor families of color unworthy of remaining a family unit.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lauren Seabrooks |
|---|
Subjects
| Subject | parental incarceration |
|---|---|
| Subject | education |
| Subject | higher education |
| Subject | Stanford Graduate School of Education |
| Subject | Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicty |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Seabrooks, Lauren (2019). It Motivated Me More Than It Crushed Me: Children of Incarcerated Parents in a Highly Selective University. Unpublished Honors Thesis. Stanford University, Stanford CA.
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Graduate School of Education
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- Contact
- laseabrooks@gmail.com
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