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| Maria Lynn Wiley: Booking Photo |
Clearly, the trail between weak family structure and teen violence is not hard to follow in many real-life cases. Take, for instance, a 14-year-old girl from Cushing, Oklahoma, who was recently ordered to Juvenile Court for the fatal stabbing of her cousin's 23-year-old fiancée.
According to a local news agency, the young girl "has a long history of being a runaway, has a fifth-grade education and began living on the street at about age 10, according to court documents. She started having sex at age 11 with men in their 20's to get drugs, court records show."
Even this minimal information, reported objectively as it is, says something about the lack of positive relationships and role models in this child's life.
The OJJDP study mentioned earlier identifies stable family relationships as protective factors against children becoming violent juvenile offenders.
"Family management practices such as failure to set clear expectations for children's behavior, poor monitoring and supervision, and severe and inconsistent discipline consistently predict later delinquency and substance abuse," say the study authors. "Parents' poor supervision and aggressive discipline predicted their children's convictions for person crimes well into their forties."
Discipline practices are known to be most effective when they are consistent and balanced. In a 1988 study published in the journal Criminology, Edward Wells and Joseph Rankin found that "direct parental controls are significantly related to various measures of delinquency," but that "either too much or too little control leads to greater frequency of delinquent behavior." In other words, very strict and punitive parenting is not any more useful for achieving the desired results as very permissive, erratic and neglectful parenting.
Wells and Rankin suggest that monitoring and regulating a child's behavior through the consistent use of known consequences can have as great an impact in preventing delinquency as that of "indirect controls" such as parental attachment. In fact, as other studies show, it is when attachment between parent and child is secure that parental controls are most effective.
While many of the initial studies about youth violence focused on boys, the same factors affect girls. The effects may be manifested through slightly different behaviors, but the need for attachment and behavioral controls is not gender-specific. Rather, it is a universal requirement of all children from their earliest days.
