Maternal Incarceration and Adolescent Depression: Neighborhood Context and the Conditional Role of School Connectedness

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 20: Youth, Family, and Social Reproduction

Abstract

Adolescents exposed to maternal incarceration often navigate overlapping forms of disadvantage rooted in family disruption, neighborhood instability, and unequal institutional contexts. Although research has documented the behavioral and educational consequences of parental incarceration, less attention has been given to the pathways linking early maternal incarceration to adolescent mental health. Drawing on social-ecological and risk-and-resilience frameworks, this study examines whether neighborhood disorder mediates the association between early childhood maternal incarceration and adolescent depressive symptoms and whether school connectedness conditions this relationship.

Using longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (Waves 1–6; N ≈ 3,100), mediation and moderated mediation models are estimated with bootstrapped confidence intervals. Findings indicate that maternal incarceration is associated with greater exposure to neighborhood disorder in adolescence, which in turn predicts higher levels of depressive symptoms. Neighborhood disorder partially accounts for the association between maternal incarceration and adolescent depression. Although school connectedness appears to condition this pathway in unadjusted models, this buffering effect is reduced after accounting for socioeconomic and family characteristics. Across models, neighborhood disorder remains a strong predictor of adolescent depressive symptoms.

These findings highlight neighborhood context as a key mechanism shaping youth mental health and suggest that school-based supports may be limited when broader structural inequalities persist.

Author

• Shannon Marie Feliciano, Lincoln University