Often I wondered what it could be like to grow up with oneâ??s parents in prison. A few days ago I brought up this question during a meeting with a group of educators in Chicago. But their varying views didnâ??t suffice my curiosity.

There are over 2 million children in the US who have one or more parents in prison. If we begin with the idea that a child needs his parents, it would be important to study how parental absence affects a child.

In â??Between Parents and Childâ?? Dr Haim Ginott underscores the fact that a childâ??s greatest fear is of being unloved or abandoned by his parents. And this same belief was echoed and immortalized by John Steinbeck in his novel â??East of Eden.â?? â?The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fearsâ?¦And with rejection comes anger and with angers some kind of crime in revenge.â? Deep inside him, a child doesnâ??t understand why his parent left. To him, he has been abandoned, therefore unattended, unloved and rejected. To the child, the reason of his parentâ??s imprisonment or divorce takes a back seat to the simple fact that the parent is gone and will no longer be involved in the childâ??s day-to-day life.

If our children are the backbone of our society then both divorce and parental incarceration go against the best interest of our future society. Should a child have more time to spend with his imprisoned or non-custodial parent?

Parenting is a social responsibility and every parent should have the right to parenting: imprisoned, divorced or otherwise. But the idea of the right to parenting by the imprisoned should not be confused with comfort. It isnâ??t the prison that is the punishment but the deprivation of liberty, no comfort in the world can compensate for a locked door!

A childâ??s fundamental right is to receive love from his parents; and reciprocally every parent should have the right to give that love to their child. Given that 80% of prisoners  in the US come from fatherless homes, future crimes as well as the number of criminals could be greatly reduced if our lawmakers focused on building effective measures to preserve the traditional idea of â??familyâ?. Through accessible free-counseling, and support groups, through information and education this could be achieved!

However, it is important to underline that there is strong public opinion against forcing couples to stay together. So how do we prevent families from breaking up in the first place? In our childhood, we study the basics of everythingâ?¦some science, some math, some history and geography but we remain unexposed to something more important: studies of the importance of our relationship with others. Decades ago, sex-education was put in place by our past lawmakers as part of the process to deal with teenage pregnancy and the spread of STD s. If our current lawmakers made an effort to consider the inclusion of some form of â??relationship-educationâ? in educational institutions like they did for sex-education in the past, the health of our society is more likely to improve. And with some luck, our future generation would probably embrace the idea of reformation through the preservation of traditional social values.