Parenting Styles and Juvenile Delinquency: Exploring Gendered Relationships

• Published date: 01 June 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jfcj.12110
• Author: Leanne Fiftal Alarid,Courtney Clare,Mike Tapia
• Date: 01 June 2018

Parenting Styles and Juvenile Delinquency:

Exploring Gendered Relationships

By Mike Tapia, Leanne Fiftal Alarid, and Courtney Clare

ABSTRACT

We use the NLSY97 dataset to examine the parenting-delinquency relationship

and how it is conditioned by parents’ gender, controlling for youths’ gender. Gener-

ally, neglectful and authoritarian parenting styles were associated with the highest

levels of delinquency in youths. When the sample was split by parent gender,

authoritarianism held up across both groups, but permissive and neglectful parent-

ing was only significant for fathers. Independent of parenting style, boys have higher

delinquency levels than girls. The strength and magnitude of this relationship is

nearly identical in separate equations for mothers and fathers. Parental attachment

was not a significant protective factor against delinquency for either mothers or

fathers.

Key words: parenting style, delinquency, gender, neglect, authoritarian, juvenile justice.

INTRODUCTION

There have always been gender differences in delinquency rates, with boys

committing more delinquent acts than girls. Of the many pathways and correlates

of juvenile delinquency, attachment to parents and the type of parenting children

Mike Tapia, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. His

teaching and research interests include Delinquency & Juvenile Justice, Street Crimes, and Race & Crime.

He has recently published work on Parental Support and Juvenile Arrest, Suicide in Juvenile Detention, and

the Effectiveness of Court Ordered Intervention Programs for Youth.

Leanne Fiftal Alarid, Ph.D., earned her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State Univer-

sity. She is currently the Department Chair and Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at El

Paso. She has conducted research with corrections agencies and authored over 60 journal articles and books,

including Community-Based Corrections (Cengage Learning). Prior to entering academe, Dr. Alarid worked

in Denver as a girls’ group home counselor and case manager at an adult halfway house.

Courtney Clare, B.A., holds Bachelor’s degrees in Criminal Justice and Psychology from the Univer-

sity of Texas at San Antonio, where she graduated Cum Laude. She is a mom to two children and is interested

in parenting research. Her honor’s thesis provided the initial concept for the current paper.

Juvenile and Family Court Journal 69, No. 2

©2018 National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges

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experience have been found to be important predictors of delinquency for both boys

and girls. However, with regard to gender effects and parenting styles, the litera-

ture does not reach conclusions that are as definitive as we might expect. For exam-

ple, most parenting-style research assumes that one style is used with all children

in each household. Thus, parenting style becomes a single measure and ignores par-

ents’ gender differences or gender of each child (Bulanda & Majumdar, 2011). This

shortcoming is important because while parenting styles can vary with different

children within the same household, parenting styles more frequently vary by gen-

der, with mothers generally more nurturing toward their children than fathers

(Ashraf & Najim, 2011; Biblary & Stacey, 2010; McKee et al., 2007). Traditional

gender roles are particularly strong in families that face economic difficulties in

which fathers may feel powerless to fulfill their perceived role (Montgomery et al.,

2016). Clear evidence shows changing gender role expectations for fathers (Kaufman

2013), but fathers in intact families still spent less time with their daughters than

with their sons (Yeung et al., 2001).

The current study is therefore important for two reasons. First, as family composi-

tion has changed over time, it adds to the small body of literature on the effects of youths’

perceptions of their mom and dad’s level of support and control with their own involve-

ment in delinquency. Second, it further delineates how parenting style and delinquency is

conditioned by parent gender, controlling for youth gender. We begin with the origins of

parenting style typologies and briefly review the research findings relative to delinquency.

We then proceed to describe parent-child attachment as a key correlate, and finally onto

our hypotheses, description of our national data set, and statistical methods.

Parenting Styles

Developmental researcher Diana Baumrind (1971) is widely known for having

studied parental behaviors at home and how these behaviors affected children’s socializa-

tion. In her now classical typology, parental characteristics of being nurturing, warm,

and supportive of their children was referred to as responsiveness.The monitoring,

supervision, and control of children’s behavior with rule setting and consequences was

called demandingness. Maccoby and Martin (1983) then used these two domains to iden-

tify four styles of parenting: Authoritarian, Authoritative, Permissive, and Neglectful.

Figure 1 shows how each domain fits to the four parenting styles and includes the pro-

portion of each parenting style used by mothers and fathers in the current study.

Authoritative parenting: Authoritative parents are the role models for overall effec-

tive child socialization and adaptive behavioral outcomes because authoritative parents

offer the right balance of warmth and support, while creating a constructive and flexible

disciplinary arrangement (Laurson & Collins, 2009; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). These

parents are open to bidirectional communication and teach their children self-control

(Trinkner, Cohn, Rebellon, & Van Gundy, 2012). This mix of positive parental attri-

butes was congruent with low levels of problem behaviors in children (Darling, 1999;

Lee, Daniels & Kissinger, 2006). Two authoritative parents provided the strongest buffer

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