Accentuating the positive or eliminating the negative? Paternal incarceration and caregiver-child relationship quality.

• Author: Wakefield, Sara
• Position: Criminology: Parents Behind Bars, part 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THE EFFECTS OF PATERNAL INCARCERATION ON CHILDREN II. PARENTAL INCARCERATION AND CAREGIVER-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS III. DATA, MEASURES, AND ANALYTIC STRATEGY A. The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods B. Measures C. Analytic Strategy IV. RESULTS CONCLUSION APPENDIX: SUPPLEMENTARY ANALYSES INTRODUCTION

While prison population growth in the United States has leveled off (and is even declining in some states), (1) the legacy of mass incarceration and its so-called collateral consequences remain the focus of significant research attention. The consequences of mass imprisonment radiate far beyond the prison or its current inmate population. Research has shown effects of imprisonment and mass incarceration on the later life outcomes of former inmates in domains as varied as employment, marriage, physical and mental health, voting behavior, and social inequality. (2) Importantly, the pains of imprisonment are not limited to inmates; those who have never served time but are connected to current and former inmates through significant social ties often experience harm as well. (3) Among the "legal bystanders" influenced by mass imprisonment are the children of inmates. (4) In the United States, more than 2.5 million minor children have a parent currently incarcerated, and the proportion of children who have ever experienced parental incarceration is much larger--especially since the dawn of the prison boom in the United States in the 1970s. (5)

The children of incarcerated parents represent perhaps the most vulnerable and consequential group influenced by the prison boom in the United States. These children are far more disadvantaged relative to the average child, even prior to the imprisonment of their parents, and parental imprisonment represents yet another potentially harmful event for an already vulnerable population. Parental imprisonment may be highly consequential because childhood events structure life pathways long after they occur (6)--as a result, the experiences of the children of the prison boom are important for social life and public policy even if prison populations decline. In this Article, I focus on the relationship between paternal incarceration and the quality of the relationship between the child and the caregiver who is not incarcerated. In so doing, I offer a more direct measure of a theoretically relevant mechanism through which a number of scholars expect paternal incarceration to influence children's later outcomes--yet, while many studies emphasize caregiver stress and parenting skills, few quantitative studies have directly measured this facet of family life for children of incarcerated parents. The results presented here suggest that the literature on children of incarcerated parents may have missed an important determinant of adult life chances for the children of incarcerated parents. Consistent with qualitative work on parental incarceration, these results show that many of the harmful effects of paternal incarceration may flow from declines in the parenting quality of caregivers of children of incarcerated parents.

1. THE EFFECTS OF PATERNAL INCARCERATION ON CHILDREN

   Research on parental incarceration, especially the incarceration of a father, shows harmful outcomes. (7) Modest but consistently harmful effects of paternal incarceration are evident across a broad range of outcomes, including mental health and behavioral problems, substance use, educational attainment, and social isolation and inequality, to name just a few. A sampling of studies on paternal incarceration suggests that we might generally agree that it is harmful for children (8)--yet theoretically important factors linking paternal incarceration to harm are often unclear or unmeasured in large surveys.

   To take but one example, consider the relationship between parental incarceration and mental health and behavioral problems. Research on this question represents arguably the most convincing evidence of the harms of paternal incarceration for children. The harmful effects of paternal incarceration for mental health and behavioral problems hold across time, multiple datasets, focal populations, age of the children studied, various outcome measures, a variety of included control variables, and increasingly rigorous analytic techniques. (9) The evidence is very strong that paternal incarceration causes increases in mental health and behavioral problems for children, (10) but the process through which this occurs is much less clear. The link between paternal incarceration and later mental health and behavioral problems for children is often attributed to some combination of financial and caregiver stress, (11) but several links in the causal chain remain unmeasured in the research literature. For example, it is unclear how financial or caregiver stress in and of itself causes mental health and behavioral problems in children. If, however, stress for caregivers brought on by paternal incarceration is accompanied by declines in parenting quality as some researchers argue, we might expect to see a corresponding increase in mental health and behavioral problems among children. (12) Stress and declines in parenting quality are commonly employed in theoretical arguments about paternal incarceration, but relatively few studies have interrogated this hypothesis directly. (13)

2. PARENTAL INCARCERATION AND CAREGIVER-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

   Outside the context of parental incarceration, it is clear that parenting behavior is important for children's current and later life outcomes. (14) As one example, ineffective parenting styles have long been linked to delinquency and poor status attainment outcomes for children. (15) More serious parenting deficits, such as those involving serious abuse or neglect, are likely to affect adult attainment outcomes as well. (16)

   Against this backdrop of broad interest in parenting behaviors, early qualitative research on parental incarceration highlighted the role of caregivers as an important feature conditioning paternal incarceration effects. Several qualitative studies, for example, show that financial stress brought on by paternal incarceration plays a direct role in increasing caregiver stress. (17) Moreover, qualitative interviews with children of incarcerated parents show that, like other disadvantaged children, this population tends to be well aware of the financial stresses facing their families. (18) Indeed, in qualitative interviews, children of incarcerated parents often link financial stress for their caregivers to the quality and stability of their interactions with them. (19) While caregiver-child relationships are central to many studies of paternal incarceration in qualitative work, arguments along these lines tend to exist in the background of quantitative research studies as theoretical motivation, rather than as a direct measure under observation. (20) Similarly, though a number of quantitative studies have examined the effects of incarceration on the partners of inmates, finding increases in stress, maternal depression, and other difficulties, (21) few of these same studies link the partner outcomes of interest to changes in parent-child relationships. (22)

   A recent exception to the dearth of quantitative work on parenting quality following paternal incarceration can be found in a particularly rigorous study conducted by Kristin Turney and Christopher Wildeman. (23) Using a dataset widely employed in the study of parental incarceration, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) study, the authors found that paternal incarceration is inconsistently linked to maternal parenting behaviors. The FFCW study found no consistent evidence that paternal incarceration changed maternal parenting behaviors, nor did it find in more rigorous models that maternal parenting stress increased. (24) These findings stand in stark contrast to qualitative work detailing poor parenting outcomes and higher stress levels for the partners of incarcerated parents. Indeed, some of these works detail especially harrowing post-parental incarceration experiences for children that involve high levels of conflict and, for some, extreme abuse in their homes. (25)

   One of the difficulties in reconciling these few studies of parenting quality following paternal incarceration is that it is unclear whether the differences in findings result from differences in the measure of parenting quality or from variations in the methodological approach employed. These issues of interpretation are quite possibly related. Qualitative studies tend to highlight negative (often extremely negative) parenting behaviors among the caregivers of the children of incarcerated parents. (26) In contrast, the Turney and Wildeman study is focused on largely positive parenting behaviors such as engagement and cooperation with partners and average effects for a large population of children. However, both groups of scholars, regardless of method, are increasingly cognizant of substantial heterogeneity in the effects of paternal incarceration on partners and children. (27) While early work on paternal incarceration describing the average effect of incarceration across a broad array of outcomes is invaluable as a starting point, (28) current research is much more focused on the protective, null, and harmful effects of paternal incarceration. (29)

   Given this backdrop, it is plausible that paternal incarceration may have both positive and negative effects on parenting quality, conditioned by characteristics of the family, pre-incarceration parenting behaviors, or a host of other considerations. To complicate matters further, paternal incarceration may increase both positive parenting behaviors (such as engagement) while also contributing to negative parenting behaviors (such as harmful conflict resolution strategies) through parental stress or lack of social supports. (30) Finally, the...