It is well-known that
disadvantaged neighborhoods, as officially identified through census data,
harbor higher numbers of delinquent individuals than advantaged neighborhoods.
What is much less known is whether parents’ perception of the neighborhood
problems predicts low parental engagement with their girls and, ultimately, how
this is related to girls’ delinquency, including violence. This paper
elucidates these issues by examining data from the Pittsburgh Girls Study,
including parent-report of neighborhood problems and level of parental
engagement and official records and girl-reported delinquency at ages 15, 16,
and 17. Results showed higher stability over time for neighborhood problems and
parental engagement than girls’ delinquency. Parents’ perception of their
neighborhood affected the extent to which parents engaged in their girls’
lives, but low parental engagement did not predict girls being charged for
offending at age 15, 16 or 17. These results were largely replicated for girls’
self-reported delinquency with the exception that low parental engagement at
age 16 was predictive of the frequency of girls’ self-reported delinquency at age
17 as well. The results, because of their implications for screening and early
interventions, are relevant to policy makers as well as practitioners.
...In the introduction we contrasted two ideas about parenting
in different types of neighborhoods. One is that parenting is better in
disadvantaged neighborhoods, because parents are aware of the dangers for their
children. A contrasting idea is that parenting is worse in disadvantaged
compared to advantaged neighborhoods because of the higher concentration of
multiple-problem families, and risk factors, and this is more impairing for
parenting strategies including parental engagement.
What is a bad neighborhood? Already in the early
decades of the twentieth century, criminologists suggested that the closest
environment and neighborhood were crucial for criminal or pro social behavior [3,4]. People in disadvantaged neighborhoods are
not different from other people, when population turnover is high; the problems
tend to stay within the neighborhood and its residents feel less safe. It is
not low average income, uneven distribution of race, or fewer resources to
schools alone, but all of these factors taken together that lead to a less
livable neighborhood. Albert Reiss wrote [23] (p. 2) that
“Dangerous places sometimes identify themselves by the visible signs of crime
environments such as broken windows, graffiti, vandalized property and drawn
iron gates. Still, the common way to think about safe and dangerous communities
is to think of them as aggregations of law-abiding and criminal persons”. The
current paper does not focus on bad neighborhoods as defined by for example
Census, but people’s subjective perceptions. Therefore we did not test for
possible differences between low income areas and other areas.
Often the role of the community in shaping citizen
morality is highly under-estimated [29,30], and is seldom discussed in relation to
parenting and the inevitable interaction with the community. In the current
study we found stronger support for parental involvement mediating the impact
of neighborhood problems on girls’ self-reported delinquency than on girls’
charges for offending. The results suggest that between ages 15 and 16,
parents’ engagement can be counterproductive in that it was associated with
higher than lower presence of delinquency (charges and self-reports). However,
the magnitude of the coefficients was small when effects were tested within the
models. On the other hand, high parental engagement was predictive of lower
frequency of girls’ self-reported offending at age 17. It may well be that
different aspects of parental engagement, such as supervision and involvement
are differently related to girls’ offending later.
One of the key questions in this study was whether
overall the results would replicate when using official charges and
self-reported delinquency, despite the prominent difference in prevalence and
correspondence between the two. We found that over all, the model replicated
well.
Full article at: http://goo.gl/xvkN9m
By:
Life History
Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 201 N Craig
Street, Suite 408, Pittsburgh, PA 15218, USA
Rolf Loeber: ude.cmpu@rrebeol; Alison Hipwell: ude.cmpu@allewpih; Stephanie
Stepp: ude.cmpu@dsppets
*Author to whom correspondence should be
addressed; Email: ude.cmpu@lnenoha;
Tel.: +1-412-383-5017
More at: https://twitter.com/hiv_insight
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