Abstract
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.
Highlights
Parenting practices and community factors are two popular explanations of juvenile delinquency, including violence, not without controversy
It is often assumed that disadvantaged neighborhoods and parenting practices predict delinquency in the offspring, but little is still known about whether this is true for girls, and if the relationship changes with age
We examined how parental engagement was related to perception of neighborhood problems and how each factor might be related to girls’ delinquency including violence
Summary
Parenting practices and community factors are two popular explanations of juvenile delinquency, including violence, not without controversy. It is well known that disadvantaged compared to advantaged neighborhoods harbor more risk factors for delinquency, and that both juvenile and parents’ problem behaviors such as delinquency, drug use, low employment rates, are overrepresented in these areas [9]. According to one train of thought, parents in disadvantaged neighborhoods are likely to be exposed to numerous risk factors that negatively affect the quality of the parenting of their offspring. Another view would be that parents living in disadvantaged neighborhoods often are aware of the dangers for their children in those settings and practice strict parenting to protect their children. Being a good parent is challenging, and even more so in disadvantaged neighborhoods
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