NCJ Number
189946
Journal
Criminology Volume: 39 Issue: 3 Dated: August 2001 Pages: 677-706
Date Published
August 2001
Length
30 pages
Annotation
Using data from the 1992 wave of the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this study examined the interrelationship between parental controls and supports and their joint influence on youthful misbehavior.
Abstract
Respondents in the NLSY have been interviewed annually since 1979 about various economic, social, and personal experiences. Assessment of the development of children born to mothers in the NLSY began in 1986 and has continued at 2-year intervals since then. The NLSY contains dual informant reports of adolescent and maternal behaviors and attitudes. Moreover, extensive measures detail the mothers' delinquent and criminal involvement in 1980, allowing for control of transmitted parental effects. The empirical analysis found that delinquency was reduced by child-parent attachment, household rules, and parental supervision. These results are consistent with Hirschi's (1969) social bond theory, which emphasizes the importance of indirect or relational control and with perspectives that emphasize the role of direct or instrumental control in fostering conformity by inducing self-control, by reducing risk preferences, or by increasing prosocial learning. The analysis also shows that even with a range of social-control and risk factors in the model, social support was inversely related to delinquency. In summary, social support apparently has direct effects on juvenile waywardness that are not explained by or contingent on parental control. These findings join with those of other studies (Baumrind, 1991; Rollins and Thomas, 1979) in suggesting that theories of delinquency that focus exclusively on control and not on support are likely to be misspecified. 4 tables and 78 references