By Katherine E Marçal and Kathryn Maguire-Jack, Photo: fizkes/Shutterstock, Housing Matters, April 20, 2022
Families of color and those with low incomes face high risk of experiencing housing cost burden, eviction, and housing instability. Housing instability can create challenges for adolescents, including higher levels of depression and psychological challenges, as well as behavioral issues. It can also cause increased interactions with other social systems, like the child welfare and criminal justice systems, which can further upend their lives.
In this study, researchers examine whether contact with these other systems cause poor adolescent outcomes for children who experienced housing insecurity as children, as opposed to directly linked to insecurity. They asked: Is housing insecurity at age 5 directly associated with delinquency or depression at age 15? And does maternal contact with the criminal justice or child welfare system mediate the link between housing insecurity and adolescent delinquency or depression?
Authors analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed about 5,000 at-risk families with children born 1998–2000 in 20 large American cities over 15 years. They also interviewed mothers in hospitals after giving birth, who afterward participated in interviews at regular intervals. They determined housing insecurity and contact with the criminal justice and child protective services through interviews with mothers, and mental health status was reported through youth self-reports. Researchers then used structural equation modeling to develop a measurement model that assessed direct and indirect pathways from housing insecurity to adolescent depression and delinquency via contact with the criminal justice and child welfare systems among families in which mothers retained at least partial custody of children (N = 2,892).
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