By Lisa Rapaport
(Reuters Health) - Children who have a parent in prison maybe more than twice as likely as other kids to have depression,attention problems and conduct disorders by the time they reachadolescence, a U.S. study suggests.
They're also more likely to drop out of high school. Andmore likely to wind up in jail, use illegal drugs, suffer fromanxiety and experience social isolation when they're adults.
"Our high levels of incarceration in the U.S. - particularlyin the past 30 years - will have consequences for generations tocome as children of incarcerated parents grow up," said WilliamCopeland, senior author of the study and director of research inthe Vermont Center for Children, Youth, and Families at theUniversity of Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington.
"To address one problem, we have created others and we needto be honest with ourselves about these costs," Copeland said byemail.
As of 2016, an estimated 8% of U.S. children younger than 18had experienced the incarceration of at least one parent, andrates were substantially higher for low-income kids andnon-white children, researchers note in JAMA Network Open.
Roughly one in four kids with an incarcerated parent hadboth parents incarcerated, the study also found.
The researchers interviewed 1,420 kids aged 9 to 16 andtheir parents up to eight times from 1993 to 2000. Researchersfollowed up with 1,334 young participants from 1999 to 2015 whenthey were 19, 21, 25 and 30 years old.
All of the participants were part of the Great RockyMountains Study and lived mostly in rural North Carolina.
By age 16, 24% of the kids had a parental figure who hadbeen incarcerated.
At this point in their lives, teens were 2.5 times morelikely to have depression or conduct disorders and 2.3 timesmore likely to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) if they had an incarcerated parent.
By young adulthood, kids with incarcerated parents were 4.4times less likely to have high school degrees. And they were 6.6times more likely to use illegal drugs, 3.4 times more likely tohave been charged with a felony and 2.8 times more likely to beincarcerated themselves.
Young adults who grew up with incarcerated parents were also2.2 times more likely to be socially isolated and 70% morelikely to suffer from anxiety or to have had a baby at a youngage.
Researchers accounted for a wide variety of other factorsthat could influence childhood and adult outcomes, includingpoverty, maltreatment and psychiatric disorders, and the impactof parental incarceration remained.
However, the study wasn't designed to determine whether orhow parental incarceration might directly cause lasting social,emotional or behavioral problems for children. It's alsopossible that results from rural North Carolina might notreflect what would happen elsewhere in the country.
Many things may contribute to negative outcomes for kids ofincarcerated parents, including the strain of familyseparations, economic hardship from lost income, and the stigmaof growing up with a parent in prison, the study team writes.
"This is a relatively common experience that has devastatingeffects that last well into adulthood," Copeland said.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2kuW1zO JAMA Network Open, onlineSeptember 4, 2019.