The Night Dad Went to Jail: Thematic Narrative Analysis of Children’s Picturebooks on Parental Incarceration and Substance Use

Abstract

Many caregivers for children of incarcerated parents report that they struggle to speak with children about their parent’s incarceration or substance use (Manby et al., 2015; Smyke, Bailey & Zeanah, 2017). Children’s picturebooks are promising tools to aid caregivers in this regard (Colomer et al., 2010; Lowe, 2009: p. 3; Wolf, 2017). However, research that explores the content of children’s picturebooks as effective communication tools on the topics of parental incarceration and substance use is limited.

This thesis uses arts-based methods including thematic narrative analysis, techniques of visual criminology, and autoethnography to explore the textual and visual narratives that are present in a series of picturebooks for children under the age of ten on the topic of parental incarceration and substance use. It also explores how these narratives resonate with my lived experience as the daughter of a former drug user and prisoner. Mobilizing a theoretical framework based on the sociology of emotions literature and picturebook studies (Hochschild, 1980; McCarthy, 1994), I conceptualize the role of specific emotions, including hope, in children’s literature. While the picturebooks accurately depict children’s emotional experiences when their parent lives with addiction or experiences incarceration, they fail to manage children’s expectations about the barriers their family may face when their loved one is released, such as barriers relating to poverty, mental illness, and relapse. The picturebooks in this study present young children with fairy tale endings and risk providing them with a false sense of hope regarding their parent’s release. Authors of picturebooks for children under the age of ten must consider how to balance truth-telling with age-appropriateness and the desire to provide young children with hope in these circumstances.