The Impact of Transient Domesticity Coparenting in Poor African American Families

描述(由申请人提供)：贫困的城市非裔美国家庭的儿童面临许多挑战，这些挑战不成比例地导致精神健康问题、教育失败、药物滥用、犯罪行为和贫困的再现。增加这些孩子的机会需要了解他们的家庭生活。在贫穷的城市非裔美国人中，长期已婚的双亲家庭大幅减少。许多成年人进行了一系列的同居，通常持续不到一年，我们称之为短暂的家庭生活。因此，这种家庭中的孩子往往有不同的父亲(有时是母亲)，并在家庭结构随后发生变化的情况下长大。这引发了对提供给儿童的育儿质量及其影响的质疑。为了获得最丰富的视角，这个项目探索了短暂的家庭生活，作为一种具有自己的期望和标准的社会安排，而不仅仅是未能遵循或实现主流规范。一些研究表明，贫穷的非裔美国人监护父母往往从各种人那里得到广泛的共同支持，特别是他们的母亲和在居住期间担任社会父亲的继任伴侣。其他研究表明，家庭不稳定会削弱儿童的安全感，从而降低他们的幸福感。这项研究通过以下具体目标有助于了解暂时性家庭生活、配对和儿童幸福：目的A.考察暂时性伴侣的共同参与，以及这种参与在关系从形成到解体的自然历史中是如何变化的；以及目的B，测量与暂时性家庭生活相关的青少年健康、行为和发展的积极和消极后果以及关系中的转变。该项目将对150个参与短暂家庭生活的贫困城市非裔美国家庭进行为期五年的小组研究，同时衡量生育过程的动态及其对11-16岁青少年的影响。该项目还将使用家庭的一个小样本进行嵌入的人种学，以更充分地用受试者自己的话来确定动态、主观经验和影响。调查结果对于完善和修改旨在通过了解受短暂家庭生活影响的儿童的资源的优势、加强这些资源并解决他们所面临的挑战，从而改善他们的生活机会的公共政策举措，应该是非常宝贵的。 与公共卫生相关：贫穷的城市非裔美国家庭中的监护父母经常发生一系列短暂的同居关系，这对儿童的心理健康问题和负面后果构成了独特的风险和可能的保护性因素。了解同居伴侣更替的性质、共同贡献的变化以及对儿童福祉的影响，将产生对制定支持儿童健康发展的政策非常有价值的见解，例如承认和加强未婚社会父亲的共同贡献的计划，以及限制与形成和解除关系相关的破坏的其他计划。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children in poor urban African American households face numerous challenges that disproportionately result in mental health problems, educational failure, drug abuse, criminal behavior and the reproduction of poverty. Improving the chances for these children requires understanding their family life. Among poor urban African Americans, long-term married, two-parent households have decreased dramatically. Many adults engage in a series of cohabitations that often last for less than a year that we refer to as transient domesticity. As a result, children in such households often have different fathers (and sometimes mothers) and grow up in the presence of subsequent changes in household composition. This raises questions about the quality of parenting provided to children and its impact. To obtain the richest perspective, this project explores transient domesticity as a social arrangement on its own terms with its own expectations and standards as opposed to merely a failure to follow or achieve mainstream norms. Some research indicates that poor African American custodial parents often receive extensive coparenting support from a variety of persons, especially their mothers and successive partners that serve as social fathers while in residence. Other research suggests that household instability can reduce children's well-being by diminishing their sense of security. This study contributes to knowledge about transient domesticity, coparenting and child well-being through the following specific aims: AIM A. Examine the coparenting involvement by transient partners and how this varies over the natural history of relationships from formation through dissolution; and AIM B. Measure the positive and negative health, behavior and developmental consequences to adolescents associated with transient domesticity coparenting and the turnover in relationships. The project will perform a five-year panel study of 150 poor urban African American households involved with transient domesticity to contemporaneously measure the dynamics of coparenting processes and their impact on adolescent children age 11-16. The project will also perform an embedded ethnography with a subsample of the households to more fully identify the dynamics, subjective experiences and impacts in the subjects' own words. The findings should prove invaluable for refining and modifying public policy initiatives aimed at improving the life chances for children affected by transient domesticity by understanding the strengths of the resources available to them, enhancing those resources, and addressing the challenges they face. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Custodial parents in poor urban African American households often engage in a series of short cohabiting relationships which present unique risk and possibly protective factors for children's mental health problems and negative outcomes. Understanding the nature of the turnover in cohabiting partners, changes in coparenting contributions and the impact on children's well-being will yield insights that should prove invaluable to developing policies to support children's healthy development such as programs that recognize and enhance the coparenting contributions by unmarried social fathers and others that limit the disruption associated with the formation and dissolution of relationships.