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Family- and School-Based Sources of Resilience Among Children of Incarcerated Parents

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Children of Incarcerated Parents

Abstract

Recent empirical evidence has identified deleterious effects of parental incarceration across multiple domains, both among young children and across the transition to adulthood. It is also increasingly recognized that children experiencing parental incarceration confront numerous additional adversities, including a broad range of family risks. Disentangling the effect of parental incarceration from these other problematic parental behaviors and family dynamics has become a focus within the incarceration effects tradition. Yet the overwhelming focus on “risk” has detracted attention from the sources of resilience that may be present within these populations. Drawing on five waves of structured interview data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS), and in-depth qualitative interviews with a subset of young adults who had experienced parental incarceration while growing up, we examined associations between parental incarceration and educational attainment, relationship commitment, and emotional well-being, adjusting for family- and school-based sources of resilience. We found that parental incarceration is associated with lower levels of educational attainment and relationship commitment and higher levels of depressive symptoms. However, indicators of school attachment and family stability contributed to more positive outcomes along these dimensions, even among youth exposed to parental incarceration. Furthermore, school-based sources of resilience appeared to be particularly central to overcoming this particular form of risk (i.e., parental incarceration), as reflected in the greater impact of school attachment on educational outcomes of children with parental incarceration backgrounds. We discussed the implications of our findings for future research and programmatic efforts targeting children of incarcerated parents.

This research received support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD036223, HD044206, and HD66087); the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice (Award Nos. 2009-IJ-CX-0503 and 2010-MU-MU-0031), and in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD050959). The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice or the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The TARS data contain little missing data. For example, after the sample restrictions were made, data on the dependent variables and sociodemographic characteristics was complete. Less than 2% of observations were missing information on the resilience processes included in this investigation. Mean imputation was used to account for these few missing values.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Jennifer E. Copp

  2. Department of Sociology, and Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

    Peggy C. Giordano, Monica A. Longmore & Wendy D. Manning

Authors
  1. Jennifer E. Copp
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  2. Peggy C. Giordano
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  3. Monica A. Longmore
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  4. Wendy D. Manning
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jennifer E. Copp .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Child Well-Being, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

    Judy Krysik

  2. Department of Criminology Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Nancy Rodriguez

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Copp, J.E., Giordano, P.C., Longmore, M.A., Manning, W.D. (2022). Family- and School-Based Sources of Resilience Among Children of Incarcerated Parents. In: Krysik, J., Rodriguez, N. (eds) Children of Incarcerated Parents. Children of Incarcerated Parents: From Understanding to Impact. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84713-5_3

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