The Impact of Transient Domesticity Coparenting in Poor African American Families

描述（由申请人提供）：城市贫困非洲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心理健康问题、教育失败、滥用药物、犯罪行为和贫困的再现。改善这些孩子的机会需要了解他们的家庭生活。在贫穷的城市非洲裔美国人中，长期结婚的双亲家庭急剧减少。许多成年人会进行一系列持续不到一年的同居，我们称之为短暂的家庭生活。因此，这些家庭的孩子往往有不同的父亲（有时是母亲），并在随后的家庭构成变化中长大。这就提出了有关为儿童提供的养育质量及其影响的问题。为了获得最丰富的视角，该项目将短暂的家庭生活作为一种社会安排，以其自身的期望和标准进行探索，而不仅仅是未能遵循或实现主流规范。一些研究表明，贫穷的非裔美国监护父母经常从各种各样的人那里得到广泛的抚养支持，特别是他们的母亲和在居住期间担任社会父亲的连续伴侣。其他研究表明，家庭的不稳定会削弱孩子的安全感，从而降低他们的幸福感。本研究通过以下具体目的，有助于了解临时家庭生活、父母教养和儿童福祉：目的A.研究临时伴侣对父母教养的参与，以及这种参与在关系从形成到解散的自然历史中如何变化；测量与短暂家庭生活、父母教养和关系转换相关的青少年健康、行为和发展的积极和消极后果。该项目将对150个从事临时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，以同时衡量共同养育过程的动态及其对11-16岁青少年儿童的影响。该项目还将使用家庭的子样本进行嵌入式民族志，以更充分地确定动态，主观经验和受试者自己的话的影响。研究结果对于完善和修改旨在通过了解受临时家庭生活影响的儿童可利用资源的优势、加强这些资源并解决他们面临的挑战来改善他们生活机会的公共政策倡议应证明是无价的。

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.