The Impact of Transient Domesticity Coparenting in Poor African American Families

描述（由申请人提供）：城市贫困非裔美国人家庭的儿童面临着许多挑战，这些挑战不成比例地导致心理健康问题，教育失败，吸毒，犯罪行为和贫困的再现。改善这些儿童的机会需要了解他们的家庭生活。在贫困的城市非裔美国人中，长期已婚的双亲家庭急剧减少。许多成年人会进行一系列的同居，通常持续不到一年，我们称之为短暂同居。因此，这些家庭中的儿童往往有不同的父亲（有时是母亲），并在家庭组成随后发生变化的情况下成长。这就提出了关于向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，这个项目探讨了短暂的非主流性作为一种社会安排，它有自己的期望和标准，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往往得到广泛的coparenting支持，从各种各样的人，特别是他们的母亲和连续的合作伙伴，作为社会父亲，而在居住。其他研究表明，家庭不稳定会降低儿童的安全感，从而降低他们的福祉。本研究通过以下具体目标有助于了解暂时性痴呆、共同抚养和儿童福祉：检查临时伴侣的共同养育参与，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AIM B。测量青少年与短暂性共同抚养和关系转换相关的积极和消极的健康，行为和发展后果。该项目将对150个涉及暂时性非裔美国人的城市贫困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。该项目还将进行一项嵌入式人种志研究，对家庭进行次级抽样，以更充分地确定受试者自己的动态、主观经历和影响。调查结果应该证明是非常宝贵的，以完善和修改公共政策的举措，旨在改善生活的机会，通过了解他们可用的资源的优势，提高这些资源，并解决他们面临的挑战，为受短暂性痴呆症影响的儿童。 公共卫生相关性：监护父母在贫困的城市非洲裔美国人家庭往往从事一系列短期同居关系，目前独特的风险和可能的保护因素，儿童的心理健康问题和负面结果。了解同居伴侣的更替性质、共同抚养贡献的变化以及对儿童福祉的影响，将产生一些见解，这些见解对于制定支持儿童健康发展的政策是非常宝贵的，例如承认和加强未婚社会父亲和其他人共同抚养贡献的方案，这些方案限制了与关系的形成和解除有关的破坏。

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.