Preventing Chronic Delinquency: The Search For Childhood Risk Factors

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

substance abuse, inconsistent and/or harsh parenting practices, low socioeconomic status, and exposure to media violence.11
The most important of these factors appear to be low socioeconomic status, having parents who have been convicted of crimes, the child's low cognitive ability(especially poor verbal ability), poor parental child rearing, and the child's own history of antisocial behavior, conduct disorder, or troublesomeness.12 In one study of boys in London, for example, the 8- to 10-year-olds with four or more of these predictors included 15 of 23 future chronic offenders (the 23 were to be responsible for fully half of the convictions in the cohort of 411 youths).12
The following sections explore evidence concerning two of the risks that have been consistently associated with later delinquency and that have most frequently been investigated in outcomes of early childhood programs.
Parenting and Social Support
Longitudinal evidence from many studies suggests that hostile ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

is some evidence that providing social support (emotional, material, or informational assistance) for parents can, in fact, operate in that fashion. Social support, from partners and from community members, helped mothers of newborns in one study respond more positively and attentively to their children.16 Conversely, low social support appears to be associated with subsequent behavior problems: a longitudinal study of 83 poor inner-city African-American and Puerto Rican teen mothers found that low social support from friends when children were one year of age predicted behavior problems when children were three years of age.17

Verbal/Cognitive Ability

Low scores on measures of ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: