The Effects of Maternal Incarceration on the Health and Development of Young Children

Background and Purpose: Over half of the children of incarcerated mothers are under ten years of age and one fourth are under four. Stability in a child's early caregiving environment is critical to future functioning in all domains. Maternal incarceration may have particularly deleterious effects on this group of children. While some work has explored the social consequences of maternal incarceration, children's health status and behavioral development remains largely unexamined. The aim of our study was to assess the association between maternal incarceration history and child health and behavior at three years of age and what relationship this has, if any, to maternal substance use and depression. We hypothesized that maternal incarceration will have a weak negative impact but that maternal substance abuse and depression will account for most of the variance in poor health and behavioral outcomes. Methods: This secondary analysis was done using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. We used three outcome variables: the child caregiver's rating of the child's health (N=4,229), the caregiver's report of child hospitalizations within the past twelve months (N=3,309), and child problem behaviors as measured by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) score (N=2,660). For the first two dependent variables, we used logit regressions to measure associations between the each outcome and maternal incarceration along with several other variables. Ordinary least squares regressions were run using child problem behaviors as the last dependent variable, the CBCL. The variation in observations was due to the number of participants who participated in the number of different phone and in-home surveys. Results: Over 6% of the mothers in this sample had a history of incarceration. These mothers were significantly more likely to be unmarried, have lower levels of education, and higher rates of prenatal smoking, depression, and drug use. History of incarceration was significantly associated with more child problem behaviors in the bivariate analysis: children whose mothers had a history of incarceration scored an average of 4 points higher on the CBCL compared to children whose mothers had not been incarcerated (p=.001). When adding demographic variables to the model, children with incarcerated mothers continued to have higher CBCL scores (4.21 points higher; p<.01). Statistical significance of incarceration disappeared in the full model although level of education, prenatal smoking, and maternal depression and drug use emerged as significant (p<.01). Conclusions and Implications: Despite the limited effects demonstrated in our study of maternal incarceration history on child health and behavior, our analysis does clearly highlight the degree to which women with a history of incarceration are significantly more likely to suffer from substance abuse and depression, variables shown in our research to have a significant effect on child health and behavior outcomes. These results have a number of implications: the need for improved access to community and correctional substance abuse and mental health treatment for mothers involved in the criminal justice system, improved service access for the children of these mothers, and the need for further research in this area.