FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

For Kids' Health, a Parent in Jail is Worse Than a Dead Parent

"Among black children with fathers without a high school diploma, about 50 percent will experience parental incarceration by age 14."
Image: prison visitation area/Dina-Roberts Wakulczyk

Having divorced parents sucks and a dead parent is wholly crushing, but worse than either is a parent in jail, at least in terms of a kid's behavioral health. This is according to research being presented this weekend at the American Sociological Association's 109th Annual Meeting by researchers based at the University of California, Irvine. What's described is an association between children with at least one parent in jail and incidences of ADHD, behavioral/conduct issues, learning disabilities, developmental delays, and speech/language problems. The underlying phenomenon is known as "stress proliferation."

Advertisement

Stress proliferation is a fairly general notion, meant to describe how stress applied to one situation or set of circumstances spreads to another set. It's often used to describe the caregivers of severely ill patients, who may themselves develop serious issues with depression and anxiety as the intensity of their caregiver role builds, with the result being a spread of caregiver-related stress into non-caregiver aspects of that person's life. You can see how the concept might apply fairly widely.

The UCI study controlled for potential complicating factors like demographic, socioeconomic, and familial characteristics by limiting its subject pool to kids with relatively similar backgrounds. The association held. And with an ever-growing population of some 2.6 million kids with a parent in jail, said association may point to an as-yet unidentified public health crisis. "These findings have important implications for health professionals," said Kristin Turney, the study's lead investigator, in an ASA statement.

"Physicians serving poor communities where incarceration is common may consider screening children for parental incarceration," she said, "as it is a risk factor that, in some cases, is more consequential than other forms of parental absence like divorce. Among black children with fathers without a high school diploma, about 50 percent will experience parental incarceration by age 14, compared with 7 percent of white children with similarly educated fathers."

The research should at the very least give some added relief to an ugly trend in the United States toward increasing mass-incarceration. In the US, the prison/jail population has spiked more than 500 percent over the past three decades; meanwhile, the US infamously boasts only 5 percent of the world's population, yet 25 percent of the world's prison population. You can see the feedback loop, implicated in the current research, at work.