Paternal Incarceration and Children’s Academic Achievement: The Role of Caregiver Parenting Quality

• In Event: Caregiver Incarceration and Childhood Adaptation

Abstract

Approximately 2.3% of American children under the age of eighteen have a parent who is incarcerated, with rates of paternal incarceration (PI; 3.2%) outpacing maternal incarceration (MI; 0.4%) by eight-fold (James, 2010). Prior research documents a host of deleterious outcomes associated with parental incarceration, including, but not limited to, increased rates of later psychopathology, criminal behavior, and persistent social exclusion (Johnson & Easterling, 2012; Murray, Farrington, & Sekol, 2012; Murray & Murray, 2010). Furthermore, extant research on parental incarceration tends to conflate PI and MI, despite calls for research on specific effects of PI as opposed to MI in childhood. Although studies have documented associations between PI and educational outcomes, such as decreased school readiness, early grade retention, and impaired cognitive capacities (Haskins, 2014; Turney & Haskins, 2014), little is known about relations between PI and academic achievement (Haskins, 2016; Turney, 2017), nor about mechanisms that may mediate such relations.
This study advanced our understanding of PI effects on children’s academic achievement by evaluating a moderated mediation model wherein we hypothesized that childhood PI (up to age 6) would predict declines in academic achievement from ages 8 to 10 via reductions in maternal supportive parenting at age 8, as moderated by child sex. Participants were drawn from an ongoing, longitudinal study of development among 250 caregiver-child dyads. PI was present among 57 dyads (i.e., 22.8%), and this subsample was diverse with respect to child sex (48.9% male) and ethnicity/race (48.9% Latinx, 15.6% Black/African American, 12.8% White/European, .6% Asian, and 22.2% multiracial). PI was measured during semi-structured interviews with the primary caregiver at ages 4, 5, and 6 (239 dyads completed 2 or more assessments). Maternal supportive parenting was measured observationally at age 8 using a series of semi-structured tasks. Academic achievement was measured at ages 8 and 10 using the Letter-Word and Applied Problems subtests from the Woodcock Johnson III Tests of Achievement (WJ-III) to assess reading and math achievement, respectively (Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001). A moderated mediation model evaluated the effect of childhood PI on academic achievement, as mediated by supportive parenting and moderated by child sex while controlling for child ethnicity/race, SES, prior maternal supportive parenting at age 6, prior maternal psychopathology at age 6, and prior academic achievement at age 6.
Consistent with our hypotheses, early childhood experiences of PI predicted declines in reading and math achievement across the elementary school years, and this relation was significantly mediated by declines in mothers’ supportive parenting from ages 6 to 8 (see Table 1). Interestingly, this explanatory pathway from PI to achievement via maternal caregiving was significant for girls, but not boys, largely due to the stronger relation between maternal caregiving and girls’ academic achievement as compared to the boys’ academic achievement.
Additional research and replication are needed, but these results suggest that mothers who manage to maintain positive parenting, despite the stress of PI, can promote positive educational outcomes for their children, especially girls.

Authors

• Jessie Bridgewater, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Tuppett M. Yates, University of California - Riverside
  Non-Presenting Author