Parental Efficacy and Delinquent Behavior: Do Control and Support Matter?

Abstract

Recently, the concept of “collective efficacy” has been advanced to understand how communities exert control and provide support to reduce crime. In a similar way, we use the concept of “parental efficacy” to highlight the crime reducing effects associated with parents who support and control their youth. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we examine the inter‐relationship between parental controls and supports and their joint influence on youthful misbehavior. The results show that (1) support and control are intertwined, and (2) that parental efficacy exerts substantive effects on adolescent delinquency for the sample as a whole and across varying age groups.

Sex differences in longitudinal pathways from parenting to delinquency

“…Both parental control (i.e., parental monitoring and parental limit setting) and parental support (i.e., quality of the parent-adolescent relationship) can be derived from the literature as important for adolescent development (Wright and Cullen 2001;Smetana et al 2006). Including multiple aspects of parenting might offer insight in whether parental monitoring, parental limit setting, and the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship might be more important for boys or girls.…”

Looking Back to Move Forward

“…As a result, most data sets included an array of risk factors that could represent a wide complement of theories and propositions. For instance, researchers interested in crime and deviance have used the NLSY data sets to investigate the general theory of crime (e.g., Turner and Piquero 2002), social learning and differential association (e.g., Sullivan 2006), deterrence (e.g., Lochner 2007), general strain (e.g., Katz 2000), social control (Harper and McLanahan 2004), Moffit's dual taxonomy (Turner, Hartman, and Bishop 2007), social support theory (Wright and Cullen 2001), as well as the relationship between offending and economic circumstances (e.g., Paternoster et al 2003), IQ (Cullen et al 1997;Herrnstein and Murray 1994), marriage (e.g., Bersani and Doherty 2013), immigrant status (e.g., Bersani In press), and a host of other factors. Clearly, the field has become adept at identifying the correlates of offending and crime, but whether and how those factors work directly, indirectly, additively, and interdependently as causes of crime is less clear (Agnew 2005;.…”

Genetic and Environmental Influences in Delinquent Peer Affiliation: From the Peer Network Approach

“…Parental control and support for their adolescents have consistently been found to be associated with adolescents' delinquent peer association (Wright & Cullen, 2001). We constructed a global measure of maternal control and support that integrates three closely related constructs measured at Wave 1In-home Interview.…”