Having a parent incarcerated is all too common, with nearly two million minor children in the United States having an incarcerated father at any given time. One of the effects on children is harm to cognitive development, sociologist Anna Haskins finds, and it’s significant enough to contribute to overall Black–white achievement gaps in school.
There are massive racial disparities in the rates at which children experience parental incarceration. Nearly 7 percent of school-aged Black children have a parent currently in prison, while the same is true of 2.4 percent of Hispanic children and less than 1 percent of white children. That adds up to one in four Black children dealing with parental incarceration by age fourteen. By contrast, less than 4 percent of white children have the same experience.
Haskins analyzes the effects of first-time paternal incarceration, specifically, on children aged nine. The data is drawn from the Fragile Families Study, a longitudinal sample of urban children. Haskins explores cognitive effects on verbal ability, reading comprehension, math problem-solving skills, and working memory/attentional capacities, comparing children whose fathers were incarcerated for the first time when the children were between one and nine years old with otherwise similar children whose fathers had never been incarcerated. Her findings “suggest that the incarceration of a father significantly limits their child’s reading comprehension, math problem-solving, and memory/attentional capacities in middle childhood,” amounting to the equivalent of one-to-two months of schooling lost.
Haskins’s sample size made it unlikely she would find statistically significant differences within racial groups, but she found “striking” consistencies by race/ethnicity. While both Black and white children showed consistent negative effects of paternal incarceration on cognitive development, the size of the effect was much larger for white children.
There were also gendered differences. Paternal incarceration affected girls more strongly, with statistically significant effects on their reading comprehension and math problem-solving. Boys, on the other hand, had reduced attentional capacities.
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What happens when these results are extended across the population as a whole? Haskins finds that, given the large racial disparities in incarceration, it could be contributing to the persistent racial achievement gaps with which so many school systems throughout the United States wrestle.
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Taking into account the larger negative effects of parental incarceration on white children than on Black children, Haskins offers two estimates. First, “if Black children experienced paternal incarceration at the same rate as White children, the Black–White cognitive skill gaps in reading, math, and attentional skills would be reduced by 1.7, 2.8, and 4.4 percent, respectively.” On the other hand, “[i]f Whites were incarcerated at the same level as Blacks, the Black–White gaps in reading, math, and attentional skills would reduce respectively by 14.1, 7.5, and 14.9 percent—albeit in a leveling-down way for White children.”
Either way, Haskins’s research highlights important connections between racial disparities in incarceration and racial disparities in educational outcomes.
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