|
 They're also more likely to drop out of high school. And more likely
to wind up in jail, use illegal drugs, suffer from anxiety and
experience social isolation when they're adults.
"Our high levels of incarceration in the U.S. - particularly in the
past 30 years - will have consequences for generations to come as
children of incarcerated parents grow up," said William Copeland,
senior author of the study and director of research in the Vermont
Center for Children, Youth, and Families at the University of
Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington.
"To address one problem, we have created others and we need to be
honest with ourselves about these costs," Copeland said by email.
As of 2016, an estimated 8% of U.S. children younger than 18 had
experienced the incarceration of at least one parent, and rates were
substantially higher for low-income kids and non-white children,
researchers note in JAMA Network Open.
Roughly one in four kids with an incarcerated parent had both
parents incarcerated, the study also found.
The researchers interviewed 1,420 kids aged 9 to 16 and their
parents up to eight times from 1993 to 2000. Researchers followed up
with 1,334 young participants from 1999 to 2015 when they were 19,
21, 25 and 30 years old.
All of the participants were part of the Great Rocky Mountains Study
and lived mostly in rural North Carolina.
By age 16, 24% of the kids had a parental figure who had been
incarcerated.
At this point in their lives, teens were 2.5 times more likely to
have depression or conduct disorders and 2.3 times more likely to
have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) if they had an
incarcerated parent.
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By young adulthood, kids with incarcerated parents were 4.4 times
less likely to have high school degrees. And they were 6.6 times
more likely to use illegal drugs, 3.4 times more likely to have been
charged with a felony and 2.8 times more likely to be incarcerated
themselves.
Young adults who grew up with incarcerated parents were also 2.2
times more likely to be socially isolated and 70% more likely to
suffer from anxiety or to have had a baby at a young age.
Researchers accounted for a wide variety of other factors that could
influence childhood and adult outcomes, including poverty,
maltreatment and psychiatric disorders, and the impact of parental
incarceration remained.
However, the study wasn't designed to determine whether or how
parental incarceration might directly cause lasting social,
emotional or behavioral problems for children. It's also possible
that results from rural North Carolina might not reflect what would
happen elsewhere in the country.
Many things may contribute to negative outcomes for kids of
incarcerated parents, including the strain of family separations,
economic hardship from lost income, and the stigma of growing up
with a parent in prison, the study team writes.
"This is a relatively common experience that has devastating effects
that last well into adulthood," Copeland said.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2kuW1zO JAMA Network Open, online September
4, 2019.
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