Stress Proliferation Across Generations: Examining the Relationship between Parental Incarceration and Childhood Health

• In Event: 150 - Regular Session. Health Disparities in Social Context

Abstract

The stress process paradigm suggests that parental incarceration, a stressor that affects a considerable and growing number of families in the United States, may have deleterious health consequences for children. In this study, I use data from the 2011-2012 National Study of Children’s Health (NSCH), a population-based and representative sample of non-institutionalized children ages 0 to 17 in the United States, to estimate the relationship between parental incarceration and children’s fair or poor overall health, a range of physical and mental health conditions, activity limitations, and chronic school absence. Descriptive statistics show that children of incarcerated parents are a vulnerable population who experience disadvantages across an array of health outcomes. After adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, parental incarceration is independently associated with learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety, behavioral or conduct problems, developmental delays, and speech or language problems. Further, parental incarceration is equally detrimental—and, in a few cases, more detrimental—than other types of adverse family experiences such as parental divorce or death. Taken together, results suggest that children’s health disadvantages are an overlooked and unintended consequence of mass imprisonment and that incarceration, given its unequal distribution across the population, may have implications for population-level racial/ethnic and social class inequalities in children’s health.

Author

• Kristin Turney, University of California-Irvine