V. TRIADIC INTERACTIONS IN MOTHER–GRANDMOTHER COPARENTING SYSTEMS FOLLOWING MATERNAL RELEASE FROM JAIL

Within every child’s family, the nature of the relationship that evolves between the adults who assume responsibility for the child’s care and upbringing—the family’s coparenting alliance—will come to play a critically important role in that child’s behavioral, social, and emotional adjustment (McHale & Lindahl, 2011). Coparenting alliances characterized by communication, cooperation, and coordination can be an unparalleled resource for the young child, providing consistent and predictable support for coping and adaptive efforts. By contrast, alliancesmarked by disconnection or dissonance can actually exacerbate child problems as nonsupport and unpredictability trigger anxiety, noncompliance, and other signs of adjustment problems. Strong and functional coparenting alliances are especially critical for children separated from a parent. During separations, the nature of the alliance between the absent mother and the child’s other caregivers can affect the extent to which the child copes successfully or becomes distressed and disorganized. Child advocates and helping professionals are in need of approaches that can help them evaluate and understand the dynamics of coparenting alliances in families of young children affected by maternal incarceration. This report presents a promising method for assessing coparenting behavior in multigenerational families where mothers have recently been released from jail. National data indicate that when mothers are incarcerated, children not fostered outside of the family are far more likely to be placed in the care of maternal grandmothers than they are to be cared for by fathers (Johnson & Waldfogel, 2004). Only 28% of incarcerated mothers report that their children are cared for by their fathers (Mumola, 2000), in large part because