Fox Matthew P, Moore Ravaris L, Song Xi
Department of Criminal Law, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Germany.
Department of Sociology, New York University, Princeton University, Loyola Marymount University, USA.
Adv Life Course Res. 2023 Mar;55:100516. doi: 10.1016/j.alcr.2022.100516. Epub 2022 Nov 1.
Parental incarceration has negative effects on children's educational outcomes. Past studies have only analyzed, and therefore only treated as consequential, parental incarceration that occurs during childhood rather than prenatally. Such analyses that emphasize the importance only of events that occur during one's lifetime are common in life course studies. This paper introduces an "entwined life events" perspective, which argues that certain events are so consequential to multiple persons' lives that they should be analyzed as events within multiple independent life courses; parental incarceration, whenever it occurs, is entwined across and shapes both parents' and children's lives. Drawing on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we find that parental incarceration, both prenatal and during childhood, significantly influences children's academic ability measures and years of completed schooling. Our results show heterogeneous effects by children's race. We find that the absolute magnitude of parental incarceration effect estimates is largest for White children relative to estimates for Black and Hispanic children. At the same time, outcome levels tend to be poorer for Black and Hispanic children with parental incarceration experience. We explain this racial heterogeneity as confounded by the many other social disadvantages that non-White children encounter, resulting in the individual effect of parental incarceration not being extremely disruptive to their academic growth.
父母一方被监禁会对孩子的教育成果产生负面影响。过去的研究仅分析了童年时期而非产前发生的父母一方被监禁情况,并因此仅将其视为有重大影响的因素。这种仅强调一生中发生的事件的重要性的分析在生命历程研究中很常见。本文引入了一种“交织生命事件”的视角,该视角认为某些事件对多个人的生活具有如此重大的影响,以至于它们应被视为多个独立生命历程中的事件来分析;父母一方被监禁,无论何时发生,都会在父母和孩子的生活中交织并塑造他们的生活。利用收入动态面板研究以及脆弱家庭与儿童福利研究的数据,我们发现产前和童年时期父母一方被监禁均会显著影响孩子的学业能力指标和完成学业的年限。我们的结果显示了孩子种族的异质性影响。我们发现,相对于黑人及西班牙裔儿童的估计值,白人儿童父母一方被监禁效应估计值的绝对值最大。与此同时,有父母一方被监禁经历的黑人及西班牙裔儿童的结果水平往往较差。我们将这种种族异质性解释为非白人儿童所面临的许多其他社会劣势造成的混淆结果,这导致父母一方被监禁的个体效应不会对他们的学业成长造成极大干扰。