Family Context, Parenting, and Delinquency

With clear links established between specific parenting practices and delinquency, it becomes important to understand the context in which parenting occurs and what factors support or disrupt effective parenting. There is growing evidence that contextual issues, including disadvantaged neighborhoods, economic hardship, stress and social isolation, family disruption, and parental depression, disrupt both parenting and child behavior. Contextual stressors have been associated with extreme forms of parenting dysfunction, including child maltreatment. [42] It is only recently that studies have begun to trace the specific ways in which the context affects parenting and family life in regard to serious adolescent behavior such as delinquency. Although many of these contextual issues are interrelated in life, they are separated in this discussion because they are usually considered separately in research.
Disadvantaged neighborhoods.-The few existing studies that examine parenting in high-risk neighborhoods show neighborhood effects on both control and affective dimensions of parenting. For example, Robert Sampson found that the level of community informal social control in families affected parental monitoring and management of adolescent behavior. [43] William McCord and Joan McCord found that lack of family cohesion-the degree of emotional bonding between family members-was predictive of delinquency only in disadvantaged neighborhoods; good neighborhoods mitigated against the effects of low cohesion. [44]
The related studies shed light on how family processes mediate neighborhood effects on adolescent behavior in addition to the direct effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on delinquency. [45] In the Rochester Youth Development Study, we found that a disadvantaged neighborhood affected delinquency both directly and indirectly by lessening parent-child involvement and supervision. [46] These findings were echoed in research from the Pittsburgh Youth Study. [47] Faith Peebles hypothesized that living in underclass neighborhoods would present such a challenge to effective parenting that the family management variables would lose their significance. This hypothesis was not supported by the study's findings that low family involvement and poor monitoring were significantly related to delinquency in inner-city neighborhoods. Skilled parents in underclass neighborhoods had sons who were less seriously delinquent than sons whose parents lacked management skills. [48] However, even "highly managed" boys in underclass neighborhoods were still more delinquent than highly managed boys in nonunderclass neighborhoods, suggesting that even effective parenting can be swamped by neighborhood disadvantage. Factors such as higher peer delinquency and substance use in the underclass neighborhoods probably contributed to the direct effects. Moreover, research with families in disadvantaged neighborhoods in Cleveland suggests that effective parenting within an individual family may not have much effect on adolescent behavior in the presence of a "critical mass" of poor parenting in the neighborhood. [49] These findings remind us of the overwhelming obstacles some parents must overcome in rearing children where there are few supports and models for effective parenting. [50]
Living in a disadvantaged neighborhood poses unique challenges for families and for effective parenting. Unfortunately, families living in such neighborhoods often must contend with other life disadvantages, such as economic hardship, negative life events, daily hassles, and impoverished social resources. This array of disadvantage places families at compounded risk for disrupted relationships. Because of discrimination and racism and their effect on opportunity, including residential choices families of color are often among those who must contend with multiple disadvantages.
Economic hardship.-A large body criminology research has explored the links between family socioeconomic status and delinquency, revealing a modest association between low social class and serious and official delinquency. [51] However, economic hardship creates pressures with profound implications for family life, and current research indicates that disruption in family processes is a crucial link in the connection between economic hardship and negative youth outcomes. For example, Robert Larzelere and Patterson found that the effects of economic hardship on delinquency in early adolescence were mediated almost entirely through disruptions in parental monitoring and discipline. [52]
A large program of research on the ways in which economic hardship affects family life and, in turn, adolescent aggression and delinquency suggest that the perceived stress from extreme financial pressures increases parent irritability, resulting in punitive and inconsistent discipline and less nurturing, supportive behavior. [53] Financial stress also contributes to parental depression, provoking marital conflict that spills over into angry, explosive parenting, which directly and adversely affects adolescent aggression. Another hypothesized step in this sequence that has received some empirical support is that the emotional distress produced by economic pressure undermines parents' confidence in their parenting skills.[54]
Stress and depression.-Patterson and his colleagues find similar links among parental stress in general, family processes, and adolescent behavior as those found for economic stress and family and child interaction. For single parents, other types of stress, whether measured as increases in daily hassles or negative life events, increase parent irritability and use of coercive discipline, precipitating the previously described cycle whereby antisocial children and adolescents provoke irritable behavior in a stressed parent. [55] An independent series of studies shows that mothers of aggressive children interact significantly more randomly and aversively with their children on days when the mothers experience stressful contacts with others than on days when they do not. [56] In Rochester Youth Development Study, we found that parental distress, which included recent negative life events, perceived stress overload, and depression, disrupted the parent-adolescent bond in families of delinquents. Parents under stress were significantly less attached to their adolescents, who were then more likely to be delinquent. [57] Reduced attachment further contributed to delinquency through reduced parent-child involvement and parental control. [58]
There is a growing body of research suggesting that parental stress and depression are highly related. [59] Depressed mothers report more parenting stress and recent negative life events than nondepressed mothers, and changes in levels of daily stress affect their daily mood. [60] Depressed parents, like stressed parents, are less effective at monitoring and disciplining and tend to be easily irritated interactions with their children, and these disruptions in parenting, in turn, increase the risk of child behavior problem. [61]
Several recent studies suggest that parental depression is a key link connecting stress to disruptions in family management in two-parent families but not in single-parent families. [62] In an important cross-site replication, Rand Conger and Patterson demonstrated that for two-parent families stress led to depression, which predicted disrupted discipline, which then related to adolescent antisocial behavior. [63] Their findings are especially impressive because the same model was replicated across a middle- to lower-middle-income rural community and a high-risk, disadvantaged urban sample. In addition, both studies used well-constructed multiple-measurement models that included observation of family interaction.
Social isolation and social support.-Research on the presence or absence of support for families and their aggressive or delinquent youth is scarce. [64] Robert Wahler found that economically disadvantaged mothers were considerably more socially isolated than middle-class mothers; the former's social contacts were primarily with family members and helping agencies, and these contacts tended to be aversive, a combination Wahler labeled insularity. [65] The previously cited studies by Wahler and his colleagues showed that on days disadvantaged mothers had either no, little, or conflictual contact with others, their perceptions of and interactions with sons were aversive while positive social contacts were associated with more positive parent-child interactions. [66] The association of amount and type of interaction with others and type of interaction with the child was maintained independently of actual child behavior as rated by trained observers in the home, suggesting that social contacts affected parental monitoring and parenting behavior as much as child behavior did. From the child's perspective, parental interactions might therefore seem inconsistent and aversive. [67] We found a significant but modest relationship between lack of support from friends and extended family and decreased parent-child involvement. Social isolation affected delinquency only indirectly through the effect of parent-child involvement on reducing parental control. [68]
The presence of support may reduce irritable, inconsistent parenting and free parental energy and resources to monitor children and provide a nurturing family environment. In their research on economically distressed families, Conger and Glen Elder found that warm and supportive relationships both within the family and outside of it reduced the adversive effects of stress on all aspects of family relationships, from parental depression and disruptions in marital and parenting processes to the development of adolescent antisocial behavior. [69] These findings are consistent with literature outside of the family delinquency field suggesting that stress is compounded by lack of social support and mitigated by its presence. [70]
Family disruption.-Family disruption and single-parent families are aspects of the family context that have been consistently linked with delinquency. Early studies of this issue sought to link rising delinquency with living in "broken homes," that is, homes without two biological parents present. A link was generally found between nonbiological family structure and delinquency, although there was some inconsistency. [71] Results of a comprehensive metanalysis of 50 studies on family structure and delinquency suggest that, on balance, delinquency is about 10-15 percent higher among adolescents from homes in which one biological parent is absent, although the link stronger for less serious forms of delinquency. [72] The study's authors also indicate that methodological inconsistencies and inadequacies make it difficult to draw conclusions about what aspects of families or adolescents help explain this link.
From the perspective of intervention, elucidating what it is about different family structures that places adolescents at higher risk of delinquency is crucial, and, in fact, later studies have explored several possibilities. [75] One explanation is that the lack of two parents may create a resource deficit. When there is only one parent in the home, other thing being equal, parenting capacities for supervision and involvement with children are stretched. In addition, parents have less time to advocate for children in other systems, such as school and juvenile justice systems. Although other supportive adults, such as a grandmother, can compensate for the lack of a biological parent, absent fathers have been associated with problems in adolescent control, as well as with parental irritability and withdrawal. [74] The absence of a father in some contexts may be more salient. For example, one study found that single-parent structure in Hispanic families but not in African-American or white families increased the risk of delinquency. [75] Several studies suggest that the link between family structure and delinquency disappears after controlling for the quality of parenting. [76] However, a recent study found a stronger family effect on reducing delinquency when the adolescent was bonded to two parents, compared with single-parent homes with one strong attachment. [77]
A second risk factor is the marital discord associated with separation and divorce. We are still unclear how conflict is translated into child antisocial behavior. Routes may be direct, for example, through parent modeling of hostility and aggression, or indirect, via disruptions in parenting. As previously noted, the increased stress associated with marital conflict contributes to harsh and inconsistent discipline. Thus, marital discord as well as the absence of a biological partner may undermine the quality of parenting. Numerous studies have demonstrated that marital conflict is associated with behavior disruption. [78] A final risk mechanism affecting children without two biological parents is transition in family structure, since these transitions are associated with particular stress and discord. One study found that, even taking into account the quality of parenting, the number of family transition was related to poor adjustment, including antisocial behavior. [79] Finding from a longitudinal representative birth cohort study are similar: family instability measured by changes in children's primary caretakers was strongly associated with police contacts in early adolescence. [80] In an important longitudinal study that begins to untangle the effects of conflict and family changes, parental discord was a risk factor for early offending even in the absence of family change, and family change was a risk factor for offending only when accompanied by parental discord. [81] Interesting questions have been raised that are not answered by available data. For example, are children who already have conduct problems particularly sensitive to marital discord and stress? Furthermore, there may be a bidirectional relationship at work whereby disruptive child behavior also leads to marital distress. [82]

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