"How Parental Incarceration Affects a Child’s Education"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Atlantic article, which summarizes some of the findings from this research report titled "Parents Behind Bars: What Happens to Their Children?" authored by David Murphey and P. Mae Cooper.  Here are excerpts from the Atlantic article:

Research has long found that children who have (or have had) a parent behind bars tend to suffer from problems including poor health, behavior challenges, and grade retention, but it’s been difficult to suss out the degree to which those issues are attributable more generally to other realities common in communities with high incarceration rates. “It can be challenging to disentangle the effects of parental incarceration from … other risk factors, such as extreme poverty,” Murphey and Cooper write. “Complicating matters further, parental incarceration can also exacerbate these associated risk factors, through loss of income, for example.”...

The researchers also found that a child who’s had a parent in prison is more likely than one who hasn’t to experience additional “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs—long-term, “toxic” circumstances such as witnessing domestic or community violence, suffering from extreme poverty, or living with someone who’s mentally ill. Research has shown that ACEs, especially when they’re cumulative, often cause childhood trauma, which can ultimately result in poor immunity and mental-health problems in adulthood and even early mortality. As James Perrin, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan last year, “If you have a whole bunch of bad experiences growing up, you set up your brain in such a way that it’s your expectation that that’s what life is about.”

Parental incarceration often acts as one such ACE because it causes a confusing, troubling loss of an attachment figure and involves ongoing contact with law enforcement, the corrections system, and child-welfare officials. But what Murphey and Cooper find is that having a parent in prison is likely to coincide with even more traumatic experiences: Children who’ve undergone parental incarceration suffer from 2.7 ACEs on average, according to their analysis of of the National Survey of Children’s Health, which lists 8 ACEs total. Children who haven’t experienced parental incarceration suffered from 0.7 ACEs on average.

Ultimately, the researchers conclude that “the harm associated with parental incarceration can compound the already difficult circumstances of vulnerable children,” a reality that’s particularly evident in their schooling. Yet, as the University of Minnesota paper shows, education policy has done little to address these kids’ particular needs. And in this age of mass incarceration, perhaps it should. In his recent cover story for The Atlantic about the topic, Ta-Nehisi Coates described mass incarceration as a vicious cycle that victimizes entire families, holding them “in a kind of orbit, on the outskirts, by the relentless gravity of the carceral state.” “Through it all,” Coates wrote, “children suffer.”