Experiences of parents of individuals labeled as a deviant
Abstract
The article is devoted to the problems of parents of convicts and those who are struggling with alcohol or drug addiction problems. It is the parents’ shared experience that because of violations of moral and legal norms their adult children are labeled as deviants. Parents who undertake efforts to help and support their child in struggling with the consequences of deviant activity are in a special situation. Scientific analyses devoted exclusively to the problems of such parents are rare. In this paper I will trace the results of research to date and show that although the basic problems of all members of families of prisoners or those with substance abuse problems are universal, there are some that apply only to parents. It is the questioning by the community of their parental skills and blaming the mothers for the problems of the child, as well as depriving them of the moral right to experience loss and separation from the child who went to prison or disappeared from the parents’ lives as a result of addiction. Moreover, attention is drawn to the strong tensions within the parental role due to the collision of the system of professed values and experienced emotions.
Keywords
parents; adult child-parent relations; parents of prisoners; parents of children with abuse problems; stigmatization
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