Examining the longitudinal effects of paternal incarceration and coparenting relationships on sons' educational outcomes: A mediation analysis

Abstract

Over 50% of the 1.5 million people in federal and state correctional facilities have children under age 18. Many of these incarcerated parents are fathers of color. Infrequent physical contact and engagement of fathers triggered by incarceration may present a great degree of disadvantage among their children. Therefore this study examined the literacy trajectory of African American boys whose fathers experience incarceration and to what extent does co-parenting between fathers and mothers intervene or moderate the effects of incarceration. The study analyzed five waves of the Fragile Families study, which provided measures of paternal incarceration and vocabulary of focal children in the study. The findings provided that paternal incarceration consistently had a negative effect on focal sons' educational outcomes across four waves of data. There was general agreement across fathers' and mothers' reports assessing the co-parenting relationship, in which fathers tended to assess the co-parenting relationships slightly stronger than did mothers. The study findings suggest that mothers and fathers co-parenting relationship did not have a sizable or significant direct influence on sons' educational outcomes across waves. However, the co-parenting construct did decrease the effect of incarceration on sons' outcomes. The study informs intervention policy and practice, which should promote enhanced co-parenting strategies that will minimize parental conflict and build parenting consensus and agreement during early and primary education engagement.