I am in a reflective mood since celebrating a milestone birthday last week. I have been thinking about the fact that I am blessed to have the best parents on the planet. I assume that some of you might take issue with this characterization and want to put up your own parents as contestants in the “best on the planet” category. That’s OK, I give you permission.

As I have been reflecting on my childhood, I can’t help but think of the millions of children and youth in America who are living without a parent because of mass incarceration. A year ago, the Pew Charitable Trust published a report that found that 2.7 million children in the U.S. now have an incarcerated parent.

2.7 million is a number that is almost impossible to fathom. Yet here we are. I have a friend who runs a program that offers free transportation to children to visit their incarcerated mothers. She always mentions the resilience of the children. However she also underscores how sad they always are when they have to leave their mothers behind. I can’t even imagine the pain of that. We rarely hear the voices of these children in the public square. One exception to this can be found in the book "What Will Happen to Me?", a publication that I wrote about a few months ago. A young boy named Kevin is quoted in the book speaking about the losses that he experiences because his stepmother is behind bars:

“If my stepmom were here, we would see her every day, and it would be happy and everything. She missed my honors assembly. Missed a lot of parent-teacher conferences — some parent things where they go to the school and talk to them about how good or bad we’ve been in school.”

Years ago, I remember seeing Daniel Beaty perform this poem “Knock, Knock” at Def Poetry Jam. I could not stop watching this clip of his performance for several weeks. He does a terrific job drawing on his own experience to paint a picture of what a child loses when his parent is imprisoned. If you’ve never seen this performance, do yourself a favor and do so today.

So many children cannot articulate their feelings of longing for their incarcerated parent and so they keep their anger, sadness, and fear bottled up. This can sometimes lead to emotional implosions and explosions.

I am happy to announce that I am currently working on a project that will address (in part) the concept of what the children of incarcerated parents “miss” when their parent(s) is locked up. I can’t wait to share more about this in the coming months.