Beyond Boys’ Bad Behavior: Paternal Incarceration and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

A growing number of American school-aged children have incarcerated or formally incarcerated parents, necessitating a more comprehensive understanding of the intergenerational effects of mass imprisonment. Using the Fragile Families Study, I assess whether having an incarcerated father impacts children’s cognitive skill development into middle childhood. While previous studies have primarily found effects for boys’ behavior problems, matching models and sensitivity analyses demonstrate that experiencing paternal incarceration by age nine is associated with lower cognitive skills for both boys and girls, and these negative effects hold net of a pre-paternal incarceration measure of child cognitive ability. Moreover, I estimate that paternal incarceration explains between 2 and 15 percent of the Black–White achievement gap at age nine. These findings represent new outcomes of importance and suggest that paternal incarceration may play an even larger role in the production of intergenerational inequalities for American children than previously documented.