The Impact of Different Family Configurations on Delinquency

Abstract

How do outcomes of boys who had experienced family disruption before age 12 years compare with those from intact families? This paper is based on a sample of 21,314 Swiss male recruits who completed a cross-sectional survey at age 20 years. As in the Cambridge Study, disrupted families predicted offending. However, intact high-conflict families predicted the same prevalence of offending as disrupted families. Boys not living with their mother, especially when they had lived in institutions before age 12 years, were most likely to become persistent offenders. Therefore, the dichotomy of disrupted versus intact family hides many important sub-groups, including those living with their mother (low-risk) and those who had experienced institutional rearing (high-risk). Background Many family factors have been shown to predict offending, including factors relating to child-rearing practices (e.g. harsh discipline, poor supervision and low parental involvement with the child) and factors relating to family characteristics (e.g. broken homes, parental conflict and family criminality) (see Farrington 2002). This paper focuses on family disruption which ‘seems to be as strong a predictor of self-reported and official delinquency as other major risk factors such as low family income, large family size, poor child-rearing, poor parental supervision, low IQ, low attainment and hyperactivity’ (Juby and Farrington 2001: 23). Interest in researching the link between disrupted families and delinquency has grown since the 1960s, largely because of the rise in both disrupted families and delinquency rates in Western industrialized countries. Rodgers and Pryor (1998) renewed research on disrupted families and estimated that the risk of delinquency for children from broken homes was double that for children from intact homes. In the Newcastle Thousand Family Study (UK), Kolvin, Miller, Fleeting and Kolvin (1988) found that 53 per cent of the boys from families where the parents had separated or divorced before age five years were convicted up to age 32 years, compared with 28 per cent of the other boys. However, research shows that the relationship between family disruption and delinquency is a complex one. In the CambridgeSomerville Youth Study in Boston (US), McCord (1982) examined serious offending among 232 adolescents from broken homes due to loss of the natural father, taking into account the level of parental conflict and whether or not the mother was loving.