Approach and institutionalization

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the attachment in the context of institutionalization of children who have built their childhoods around prisons, while their mothers were in the prison system. The theoretical basis of the subject focuses on the culturalist and social approach. The research developed during the PhD in education aimed to answer the question: How do children, experience the imprisonment of their father and / or mother? Methodologically defined as a qualitative research and Ethnographic Case Study, it allowed to know the meanings and cultural experiences of childhood through a description that showed the meaning that children give to life in prision and how they interpret and build their world through this sense development of a child in prison can be characterizedby a construction of attachment where the child experiences cycles of protection and at the same time have distance and therefore unprotected feeling. Children experience conflicts because they see and feel the situation of imprisonment and punishment of the family, living in a context of institutionalization in shelter and face the fact of belonging to a group: children of prisoners.