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Parenting Styles and Juvenile Delinquency: Exploring Gendered

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Article  in  Juvenile and Family Court Journal · June 2018

DOI: 10.1111/jfcj.12110

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 Parenting Styles and Juvenile Delinquency:
Exploring Gendered Relationships

By Mike Tapia, Leanne Fiftal Alarid, and Courtney Clare

ABSTRACT

We use the NLSY97 dataset to examine the parenting-delinquency relationship

and how it is conditioned by parents’ gender, controlling for youths’ gender. Gener-
ally, neglectful and authoritarian parenting styles were associated with the highest
levels of delinquency in youths. When the sample was split by parent gender,
authoritarianism held up across both groups, but permissive and neglectful parent-
ing was only significant for fathers. Independent of parenting style, boys have higher
delinquency levels than girls. The strength and magnitude of this relationship is
nearly identical in separate equations for mothers and fathers. Parental attachment
was not a significant protective factor against delinquency for either mothers or
fathers.

Key words: parenting style, delinquency, gender, neglect, authoritarian, juvenile justice.

INTRODUCTION

There have always been gender differences in delinquency rates, with boys
committing more delinquent acts than girls. Of the many pathways and correlates
of juvenile delinquency, attachment to parents and the type of parenting children

Mike Tapia, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at New Mexico State University. His
teaching and research interests include Delinquency & Juvenile Justice, Street Crimes, and Race & Crime.
He has recently published work on Parental Support and Juvenile Arrest, Suicide in Juvenile Detention, and
the Effectiveness of Court Ordered Intervention Programs for Youth.
Leanne Fiftal Alarid, Ph.D., earned her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Sam Houston State Univer-
sity. She is currently the Department Chair and Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at El
Paso. She has conducted research with corrections agencies and authored over 60 journal articles and books,
including Community-Based Corrections (Cengage Learning). Prior to entering academe, Dr. Alarid worked
in Denver as a girls’ group home counselor and case manager at an adult halfway house.
Courtney Clare, B.A., holds Bachelor’s degrees in Criminal Justice and Psychology from the Univer-
sity of Texas at San Antonio, where she graduated Cum Laude. She is a mom to two children and is interested
in parenting research. Her honor’s thesis provided the initial concept for the current paper.

Juvenile and Family Court Journal 69, No. 2 21

© 2018 National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges
22 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

experience have been found to be important predictors of delinquency for both boys
and girls. However, with regard to gender effects and parenting styles, the litera-
ture does not reach conclusions that are as definitive as we might expect. For exam-
ple, most parenting-style research assumes that one style is used with all children
in each household. Thus, parenting style becomes a single measure and ignores par-
ents’ gender differences or gender of each child (Bulanda & Majumdar, 2011). This
shortcoming is important because while parenting styles can vary with different
children within the same household, parenting styles more frequently vary by gen-
der, with mothers generally more nurturing toward their children than fathers
(Ashraf & Najim, 2011; Biblary & Stacey, 2010; McKee et al., 2007). Traditional
gender roles are particularly strong in families that face economic difficulties in
which fathers may feel powerless to fulfill their perceived role (Montgomery et al.,
2016). Clear evidence shows changing gender role expectations for fathers (Kaufman
2013), but fathers in intact families still spent less time with their daughters than
with their sons (Yeung et al., 2001).
The current study is therefore important for two reasons. First, as family composi-
tion has changed over time, it adds to the small body of literature on the effects of youths’
perceptions of their mom and dad’s level of support and control with their own involve-
ment in delinquency. Second, it further delineates how parenting style and delinquency is
conditioned by parent gender, controlling for youth gender. We begin with the origins of
parenting style typologies and briefly review the research findings relative to delinquency.
We then proceed to describe parent-child attachment as a key correlate, and finally onto
our hypotheses, description of our national data set, and statistical methods.

Parenting Styles

Developmental researcher Diana Baumrind (1971) is widely known for having

studied parental behaviors at home and how these behaviors affected children’s socializa-
tion. In her now classical typology, parental characteristics of being nurturing, warm,
and supportive of their children was referred to as responsiveness. The monitoring,
supervision, and control of children’s behavior with rule setting and consequences was
called demandingness. Maccoby and Martin (1983) then used these two domains to iden-
tify four styles of parenting: Authoritarian, Authoritative, Permissive, and Neglectful.
Figure 1 shows how each domain fits to the four parenting styles and includes the pro-
portion of each parenting style used by mothers and fathers in the current study.
Authoritative parenting: Authoritative parents are the role models for overall effec-
tive child socialization and adaptive behavioral outcomes because authoritative parents
offer the right balance of warmth and support, while creating a constructive and flexible
disciplinary arrangement (Laurson & Collins, 2009; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). These
parents are open to bidirectional communication and teach their children self-control
(Trinkner, Cohn, Rebellon, & Van Gundy, 2012). This mix of positive parental attri-
butes was congruent with low levels of problem behaviors in children (Darling, 1999;
Lee, Daniels & Kissinger, 2006). Two authoritative parents provided the strongest buffer
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 23

Figure 1. Parenting Styles for Mothers and Fathers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
1997 (NLYS97) Dataset

Responsiveness (Support/Nurturing)
Demandingness (Control)

High Low

High Authoritative Authoritarian

Mom Dad Mom Dad

42.3% 39.1% 12.4% 19.6%
Permissive Neglectful
Low

Mom Dad Mom Dad

35.0% 28.6% 10.4% 12.7%

against delinquency, but even one authoritative parent provided some protection
(Simons & Conger, 2007).
Authoritarian parenting: Authoritarian parents elicit rigid discipline, little to no
flexibility, and a highly structured environment. These parents tend to be highly con-
trolling with less receptivity to their children’s preferences (Laurson & Collins, 2009;
Trinkner et al., 2012). Overtly strict parenting may inhibit their children’s personal
growth and independence. As children resist the controls on freedom, they become more
likely to rebel by turning to delinquency. Authoritarian parenting styles were moder-
ately likely to lead to negative outcomes for youths (Darling, 1999; Hoeve, Blokland,
Dubas, Loeber, Gerris, & van der Laan, 2008; Lee et al., 2006; Trinkner et al., 2012).
Permissive/Indulgent parenting: Permissive parents tend to be highly supportive,
approachable, and lenient. However, permissive parents do not establish boundaries for
their children and rarely enforced the rules. As a result, society may see permissive par-
ents as less legitimate (Laurson & Collins, 2009; Trinkner et al., 2012). Youths who per-
ceived their fathers as permissive had less socially desirable adjustment outcomes than
youths who perceived their fathers as authoritarian or authoritative (Kausar & Shafique,
2008). Failure to monitor and control their children’s behavior, and to recognize and
punish deviant behavior, leads to lack of self-control in children, further increasing the
risk of delinquency (Hoeve et al., 2008). Finally, Church et al. (2015) noted that young
black males with lax family rules, curfew expectations, and parental monitoring experi-
enced high levels of delinquency.
Neglectful parenting: Youths with neglectful parents often lack adult supervision
(e.g., leaving young children alone for long time periods or leaving children in the care
of persons who may be abusive) or assumed inappropriate responsibilities for the care of
younger siblings. Neglectful parents tend to detach themselves emotionally from their
children, provide minimal response to their needs (Hirschi, 1977; Lee et al., 2006) and
24 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

often overlook accessibility to illicit drugs, weapons, and/or pornography in younger

children’s reach (Samuels, 2011). Of all parenting styles, neglectful parents were at great-
est risk of having youths involved in delinquency (Simons & Conger, 2007; Hoeve et al.,
2011).

Attachment to Parents

Simultaneous with Baumrind’s (1971) work, Hirschi’s (1969) social bonding

theory emphasized conventional bonds and attachment to parents and/or guardians.
This now classical criminological theory suggested that delinquency is more likely
when bonds between society and individuals are weakened, with respect to paren-
tal attachment, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in legitimate
activities, and belief in the law. Of the four elements of the social bond, attach-
ment to parents has been found to be a strong indicator of delinquency (McClus-
key & Tovar, 2003) especially for young females charged with felonies (Alarid,
Burton & Cullen, 2000). Parent-child connections were better predictors of future
delinquency than were other social indicators, such as income or family type (Col-
lishaw et al., 2011).
Positive parent-child attachments yield lower levels of delinquency, particularly
when attachments to both parents are strong, more so than when strong attachments are
present with only one parent (Rankin & Kern, 1994). If the attachment between child
and parent is weak and youths no longer care about their parents’ reactions, youths
become more likely to commit delinquent acts because they perceive that they have less
to lose. This lack of attachment to their parents arguably leads to a lack of respect toward
teachers and other authority figures (Hirschi, 1977), and is a known pathway to delin-
quency when it is replaced with attachment to deviant peers (Laurson & Collins, 2009;
Thornberry, 1987). There are various ways to define parental attachment, but most defi-
nitions include love and affection, respect, and communication between parent and child.
Some definitions also extend to type and level of supervision and quantity or quality of
interaction. While it is expected that parental attachment will play a role in youth delin-
quency, the focus of this study was on parenting styles. Thus, parental attachment is a
control variable in the analyses.

Hypotheses

Because neglectful parents are deficient in both supervision/control and warmth/

emotional support, this parenting style should be the most damaging to youth develop-
ment and behavior. Thus, we hypothesize (H1) that for both mothers and fathers, a
neglectful parenting style is associated with more youth delinquency than other parent-
ing styles.
For the second and third hypotheses, we predict gender-specific effects of parenting
styles (mother versus father) on youth delinquency. Baumrind (1991) posited that “tradi-
tional parenting” is where a father is either authoritative or authoritarian and a mother is
indulgent/permissive. If this combination is normative, or “functional,” we hypothesize
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 25

that deviation will result in a higher delinquency level. Thus, for H2, we predict that
fathers with a permissive parenting style will have a greater effect on increasing youth
delinquency than mothers with a permissive parenting style. Kausar and Shafique (2008)
found that youths who perceived their fathers as permissive had less socially desirable
adjustment outcomes than youths who perceived their fathers as authoritarian or authori-
tative. However, this was a study in Pakistan, which presents arguably a different cul-
tural context than the U.S.
We are cautious with this prediction, however, because some recent research
notes that fathers with a traditional gender ideology show less parental involve-
ment than fathers with an egalitarian ideology (Bulanda, 2004; Sabattini & Lea-
per, 2004). This research threatens our hypothesis because fathers’ involvement has
been shown to have strong positive effects on youth outcomes (Pruett, Cowan,
Cowan, & Pruett, 2000). Furthermore, some studies have found that between 50
and 75 percent of two-parent families use the same parenting style (Fletcher,
Steinberg, & Sellers, 1999). Lastly, Simons and Conger (2007) also found that the
least common gender-specific parenting style combination was an indulgent father
and strict mother. In the current study, 54.4 percent of youths rated both parents
as permissive, which appears to be a high enough incidence of off-paired parental
ratings to observe an effect.
Youths more commonly perceived mothers as nurturers, caretakers and providers
of emotional security (Biblarz & Stacey, 2010). Mothers are known to speak more softly
to their children, and to emphasize thoughts and feelings more so than fathers (Ashraf &
Najam, 2011). Thus, if a mother behaves outside these gender norms, this behavior is
predicted to have a more negative effect on children than if a father lacked emotional
support/warmth. The third and final hypothesis (H3) is that mothers who are perceived
to be authoritarian will be more likely to have children engaged in delinquency than
fathers who are authoritarian. In the current study, 48.1 percent of youths rated both par-
ents as authoritarian.

METHODS

We used the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97), a representa-

tive sample of nearly 9,000 U.S. youth. In 1997 the Bureau of Labor Statistics took a ran-
dom, multi-stage cluster sample of youths 12 to 16 years old as of December 31, 1996
and living in the U.S. The initial wave consists of a cross-sectional sample of respondents
representative of all youths (N = 6,748) and an oversample of black and Hispanic youths
(N = 2,236). These panel data contain a wide range of information collected on respon-
dents each year, including their delinquency levels, arrests, and other legal and social
indicators such as relationships with parents.1 Most of the information is obtained
through youth self-reports with additional information gathered from the youths’

1
The NLSY97 uses the term “Uninvolved” to capture the “Neglectful” parenting style. These appear
to be synonymous.
26 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

parents. With the exception of items that are constant over time (such as sex), each indi-
cator in the study is measured at each wave of analysis.
There were 6,366 youths residing with a mother and a father figure in 1997
(Wave 1). Of these youths, 4,351 had a valid youth rating for both mothers’ and fathers’
parenting style in 1998. There were no significant differences between the Wave 1 and
Wave 2 sample used in the study. The largest difference was with delinquency, which was
five percent lower at Wave 1 than at Wave 2. We utilized Wave 2 to be able to control for
criminal history (described in ‘Control Variables’ below).

Measures

The dependent variable, youth delinquency, was measured using a self-report ques-
tionnaire completed by the youths regarding engagement in illegal acts over the 12
months before the 1998 interview (Wave 2 of the NLSY). Respondents reported the
number of times they committed delinquent acts ranging in severity from substance use/
abuse and minor theft to assault with injury and carrying a firearm (11 total items in the
survey). As the number of cases tapers off in the higher frequency scores, skewing the
variable, all items are truncated at “6 or more.” These items were combined to form a
continuous delinquency index ranging from 0 to 66 (a = .70).
The independent variable, parenting style, was a combination of two self-reported
measures.2 The first measure asked youths to rate each parent separately regarding the
parents’ level of support of the youth (responsiveness). Responses were initially measured
on a three-point scale: very supportive, somewhat supportive, and not supportive. Very
supportive was recoded as 1 for “high responsiveness,” and the latter two were collapsed
and recoded as 0 for “low responsiveness.” The second measure asked youths whether
each parent was permissive (coded as 0 for “low demandingness”) or strict (coded as 1 for
“high demandingness”). The two items were then merged to create the four parenting
styles defined earlier by Maccoby and Martin (1983).

Control Variables

Youth respondent’s sex was dichotomous (1 = male; 0 = female). Age was a contin-
uous variable, ranging from 13 to 19 in 1998. The youth’s criminal history and delin-
quent propensity were addressed by asking whether the youth was ever arrested before
1998 (yes/no composite from Wave 1 and Wave 2). Parental attachment was a three-
item scale of youth perceptions of each parent separately, where responses for each item
range from strongly disagree (0) to strongly agree (4). Youths were asked the extent to
which they (1) enjoyed spending time with mom/dad, (2) think highly of mom/dad, and
(3) the extent to which mom/dad praises the youth for doing well. This 3-item parental
attachment measure has been used in previous research with this same data set

2
Parenting Style is a pre-constructed variable in the NLSY97. There are extensive notes on the ratio-
nale for its construction, its psychometric properties, and validity specifications in the NLSY97 User’s Guide
(see Center for Human Resource Research 2011).
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 27

(McCluskey & Tovar, 2003; Tapia, Alarid & Hutcherson, 2015). The Cronbach’s alpha
reliability score was .63 for mothers and .71 for fathers.3

Analytic Approach

We compared delinquency levels for each of the four parenting styles described
above by combining mothers and fathers for the full sample in 1998 (n = 4,351). The
sample was divided by parent gender (mothers and fathers), and delinquency levels were
re-examined for each parenting style. Finally, using multivariate regression we con-
trolled for youth gender, age, prior arrests, and parental attachment to examine the rela-
tionship between parenting style and the child’s delinquency. We estimated Poisson
regression models for mothers and fathers separately. Listwise deletion of cases missing
on independent variables yielded n = 3,920 or 91 percent of the original sample in the
final regression models.

FINDINGS

As an initial point of analysis, we examined the extent to which parents differed on

parenting style, as reported by their children. A cross-tabulation of parenting styles (not
shown) reveals a correspondence rate of 64.5 percent on Authoritativeness, 48.1 percent
on Authoritarianism, 54.4 percent on Permissiveness, and 42 percent on Neglectfulness.
Figure 2 contains the mean reported delinquency level in the 12 months before the 1998
interview, according to each predominate parenting style for both parents combined.
Interestingly, 53.8 percent of the sample reported no delinquent episodes. Average
delinquency scores did not exceed 3.8 across parenting styles. Figure 2 shows that
Neglectful parents had children with the highest delinquency rates (M = 3.78), followed
by Authoritarian parents (M = 3.31).
T-tests in Table 1 indicated whether the delinquency levels reported for each par-
enting style were significantly different from the remainder of the sample. Delinquency
among youths with Neglectful parents was significantly higher than with the other three
styles, which supported H1. Delinquency among youths who reported overly strict
Authoritarian parents was slightly higher, but the difference was not significant. Permis-
sive and Authoritative parents had significantly lower delinquency levels than the
remaining sample.
Hypothesis 2 predicted that having a permissive father would be associated with
more delinquency than having a permissive mother. But the overall data pattern of
Figure 3 generally followed that of Figure 2, where Neglectful and Authoritarian par-
enting was associated with more youth delinquency than the other parenting styles. Only
small changes in delinquency levels for each parenting style occurred by gender.
3
Pearson’s bivariate correlations between responsiveness and attachment is .10, (p < .01) for mothers
and .11 (p. < .05) for fathers. Although moderately correlated, it does not appear that these two items mea-
sure the same dimension. Moreover, the individual measure for Supportiveness per se is not used in the study,
it is only part of the composite measure for parenting style.
28 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

Figure 2. Delinquency Level by Parenting Style (Both Parents Combined)

4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Neglecul Permissive Authoritarian Authoritave

Opposite the prediction in Hypothesis 2, youths with permissive mothers engaged

in slightly more delinquency (M = 2.05) than youths with permissive fathers
(M = 1.86), and this effect was not much different between boys and girls (see Figure 3).
The difference by parent gender was not statistically significant (t = 2.9). Hypothesis 3
predicted that Authoritarian mothers would be associated with more delinquency than
Authoritarian fathers. The slight differences seen in Figure 3 were not statistically
significant (t = 0.12), even between boys and girls. Separate regressions for each parent
may illustrate whether this relationship is mediated by other variables.
To account for other possible confounding influences on the delinquency-parental
style relationship, we used Poisson regression to properly analyze the count-based depen-
dent variable. Count-variables with many zero values and with no theoretical upper limit
(e.g., number of delinquent acts) are well suited to analysis with a Poisson regression pro-
cedure. Zero was the modal response on delinquent counts, with 54 percent of youths

TABLE 1
Delinquency Level by Parenting Style
Self-Reported Delinquency 1998
Parenting Styles Mean (s.d.) t-value
Neglectful 3.77 (6.87) 2.851*
All Others 2.91 (6.08)
Permissive 2.16 (4.82) 4.587*
All Others 3.09 (6.32)
Authoritarian 3.31 (6.62) 1.826
All Others 2.91 (6.06)
Authoritative 1.41 (3.77) 13.204*
All Others 3.52 (6.70)
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 29

Figure 3. Delinquency Level by Parenting Style by Parent and Child Sex

6.
Mothers Fathers
5.
Delinquency Level

4.

3.

2.

1.

0.
Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls Boys Girls
Neglect. Permiss. Authoritar. Authoritat. Neglect. Permiss. Authoritar. Authoritat.

reporting no delinquent acts within a 12-month period. Delinquency figures were highly
dispersed around the mean, with the variance about double the mean size. Negative
binomial regression may be able to yield valid estimates when the data are over-dispersed
in this way (Long & Freese, 2003), but negative binomial regression is limited by possi-
ble distortion of effects and potential intercept shift (Cameron & Trivedi, 2013). Poisson
models tend to be less affected by over-dispersion in panel data (like the NLSY97) than
in cross sectional data (Wooldridge, 2002).
Table 2 contains the distribution of all variables used in the regression analyses.
Youth gender is well-balanced in the sample, at 51.2 percent male and 48.8 percent
female. The average age of youths in this Wave was 16 years. Five percent of the sample
had an arrest before 1998.4 The levels of attachment to mom and dad were comparable
with mean attachment to mom at 9.21 and mean attachment to dad at 8.72.

Regression Analyses

Regression analyses were performed for mothers in Table 3 and fathers in Table 4.
Model 1 (Parenting) entered all parental variables, to include parenting style and level of
attachment. As the most favorable parenting style reflected both in the literature
(Darling, 1999; Lee et al., 2006; Trinkner et al., 2012) and in bivariate analyses, the
Authoritative parenting style was the omitted category in regression, against which coef-
ficients for all other parenting styles were compared. Model 2 added in the study’s delin-
quency variables, and Model 3 added youth demographics.
In Table 3, Model 1 showed that relative to Authoritative mothers, all other moth-
ering styles were associated with statistically significant increases in youth delinquency
levels. The value of R2 jumped significantly with the addition of the delinquency variables

4
Prior delinquency without arrest (not shown) is a much more common behavior by American
youth, with 53 percent reporting engaging in some type of delinquency.
30 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

TABLE 2
Distribution of Variables Used in Regression Analyses
Mean
Variable (SD) % Min Max
Delinquency 2.96 – 0 66
(6.13)
Youth Male – 51.2 0 1
Youth Female – 48.8 0 1
Youth Age in 1998 15.97 – 13 19
(1.44)
Prior Arrests in 1998 .05 – 0 1
(.23)
Attachment to Mom 1998 9.21 – 0 12
(2.36)
Attachment to Dad 1998 8.72 – 0 12
(2.72)

in Model 2. In this Model, the Authoritarian style remained positive and significant. All
other parenting styles lost significance with the addition of these items. The level of
Attachment between youths and their mothers had a slight negative effect on delin-
quency, but it was not significant. Prior arrests had a positive, significant effect on current
delinquency, with a large coefficient relative to those of parenting items. With the

TABLE 3
Poisson Regression of Mother’s Parenting Style on Youth Delinquency
Parenting Delinquency Full Model
B SE B SE B SE
INTERCEPT .78* .33 .27 .25 1.72 .97
Authoritarian .65** .21 .53*** .15 .52*** .16
Permissive .35* .17 .14 .13 .14 .14
Neglectful .81*** .21 .29 .19 .31 .19
Parental Attachment .04 .03 .02 .02 .02 .02
Prior Youth Arrests – – 2.34*** .11 2.26*** .11
Youth Age – – – – .13* .06
Youth Gender (1 = Male) – – – – .26* .11
Pseudo R² .03 .33 .34
Number of Observations 3,960 3,920 3,920
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (two-tailed)
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 31

TABLE 4
Poisson Regression of Father’s Parenting Style on Youth Delinquency
Parenting Delinquency Full Model
B SE B SE B SE
Intercept .53 .35 .07 .28 2.25 1.11
Authoritarian .87*** .23 .63*** .17 .61*** .17
Permissive .46* .21 .33* .17 .34* .16
Neglectful .92*** .23 .49* .20 .47* .20
Parental Attachment .04 .03 .02 .02 .02 .02
Prior Youth Arrests – – 2.23*** .14 2.18*** .14
Youth Age – – – – .15* .07
Youth Gender (1= Male) – – – – .27* .13
Pseudo R² .05 .30 .31
Number of Observations 3,960 3,920 3,920
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001 (two-tailed)

addition of youth demographic variables in Model 3, the Authoritarian parenting style

remained positive and significant with little difference from Model 2. No other parenting
variables regained significance in the full model. Youth Age and Gender (Male) were posi-
tive and significant, which are both normative findings in the delinquency literature.
Table 4 showed the effect of Fathers’ parenting style on delinquency for compar-
ison to that of Mothers. Overall, the model fit was remarkably similar for mothers and
fathers. Pseudo r-squared was within a similar range for both parent genders and a size-
able jump in this statistic from Model 1 to Model 2 was present for both. As with moth-
ers, the R2 remained the same with the addition of demographics in Model 3 for fathers.
For Fathers, the Authoritarian coefficient, like that of Mothers, was positive and signifi-
cant throughout all models. However, the remaining parenting styles were positive and
significant for fathers relative to the Authoritative category. Neglect and Permissiveness
among fathers significantly increased youth delinquency levels
Contrary to our expectation, parental attachment had no effect on delinquency for
either parent gender. Attachment was negatively associated with delinquency for both
parents, but it was a very weak association that never reached significance. Finally, youth
gender and age had nearly identical effects on delinquency (positive and significant), con-
trolling for parenting variables.

DISCUSSION

The current study examined the effect of parenting styles on delinquency and
focused on the extent to which parent gender played a role controlling for youth gender.
Clearly, parents can play a critical socialization role in curbing or reducing socially
improper behavior (Andrews, 1998), and these effects may be gendered. The study
32 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

yielded several notable findings in this regard and at least one unexpected finding. First,
as predicted, neglectful parenting was associated with the highest level of youth delin-
quency in bivariate tests. This finding was consistent with previous research that com-
pared the four parenting styles (Simons & Conger, 2007). However, it was ultimately
true only for fathers, as evidenced in regression. Perhaps the form of parental neglect by
fathers is qualitatively different than that of mothers in a way that corresponds to
increased levels of delinquency. For example, there is a notable track record of children
who follow in their criminal parents’ footsteps in the literature on this topic (Besemer
2012; Farrington, 2011) and males, regardless of age are more involved in crime and
delinquency. Neglect by the father includes exposing their children to criminogenic fac-
tors and situations, which may be captured in these data. In terms of functional policy
responses, the juvenile justice and foster care systems were created in part to respond to
the needs of dependent and neglected children who were at risk of becoming delinquent
(Barn & Tan, 2012).
Consistent with much of the prior research, the authoritarian parenting style was
also correlated with youth delinquency. It was a robust correlation that held up for both
parents. Our hypothesis on this category (H2) was not supported, as the findings sug-
gested that authoritarian mothers had the same effect on delinquency as authoritarian
fathers (a slightly weaker effect, in fact). These findings suggest that youths respond sim-
ilarly to a stern or disciplinarian parent, regardless of the parent’s gender.
For permissive parenting styles, we hypothesized that this quality in fathers would
tend to increase delinquency in children because fathers are more often seen as authority
figures. We reasoned that without a strong rule-setting father, children would be more
likely to stray into delinquency. Here, indeed, the data did show a gender difference with
respect to permissive parents. Ultimately, this parenting style had no effect on delin-
quency for youths of permissive moms, but it had a positive, significant effect with dads.
Our findings here were consistent with Kausar and Shafique’s (2008) study, which found
that youths who perceived their fathers as permissive had less socially desirable adjust-
ment outcomes. However, Kausar and Shafique’s findings (2008) are from a sample of
families from Pakistan.
In terms of the gendered effects in the current study, the regression models overall
“behave” rather similarly for both mothers and fathers, but there are several key differ-
ences to highlight. First, the results suggested that fathers’ parenting styles had a greater
influence on delinquency than mothers’. This distinction is evidenced by stronger coeffi-
cients for fathers on all parental style variables, and by the fact that fathers registered sig-
nificant differences in three parenting styles versus only one for mothers. This finding is
consistent with previous research, particularly for the effect that fathers may have on
their sons’ behavior (Hoeve et al., 2009). Specifically, the current study found that
fathers who neglected their children and who were overly permissive with them were
more likely to have delinquent children.
Compared to other recent studies, youth attachment to parents was far less impor-
tant to predicting youth delinquency in the current study. This comparison appears to
specify some of the findings in recent research that includes a test of this issue. For exam-
ple, Hoeve et al. (2009) found that poor paternal support among fathers was more
 Tapia et al. / PARENTING STYLES AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY | 33

strongly related to youth delinquency than maternal support among mothers. More gen-
erally, a father’s involvement has positive effects on families and a strong influence on
the development of children socially, emotionally, and cognitively (Pruett, Cowan,
Cowan, & Pruett, 2000).
By contrast, we found parental attachment to be equally unimportant to predicting
delinquency for both parent genders. This finding may seem contrary to previous find-
ings (Anderson, Holmes, & Ostresh, 1999; Fagan et al. 2011; McCluskey &Tovar, 2003;
Rankin & Kern, 1994), but these previous studies did not account for parenting styles.
Ordinary least squares models produced in earlier phases of our study showed that paren-
tal attachment was a significant protective factor against children’s delinquency for
mothers only. However, when we used the more appropriate count-based Poisson model,
the finding did not hold. This circumstance may suggest that findings regarding attach-
ment to parents in studies of this type may be prone to change with alternate modeling,
in that it is a methodological artifact of some studies.

Limitations

The current study was designed to examine two-parent households. The structure
of the family has changed, with more children now living in single parent households
and in shared custody arrangements than in traditional two-parent households (U.S. Cen-
sus Bureau, 2011). Future studies should consider these other living arrangements.
A second methodological concern was that parenting style was a youth-generated
measure, and thus may not be highly reliable over time. It has been noted that adolescent
assessments of support and other parenting dynamics are arguably more valid than par-
ents’ self-assessments because youths are more sensitive to changes in parental style and
support (Laird, Pettit, Bates, & Dodge, 2003). Yet, Simons and Conger (2007) find that
observer ratings of parent-child interactions and child self-reports had low agreement
rates for classifying parenting style. Still, we must remember that family relationships
are often complex and dynamic. Where youth temperaments can be volatile, there is
much potential for variations in youth-generated parent ratings to be situational (Assor
& Tal, 2012; Laurson & Collins 2009; van Aken, van Lieshout, Scholte, & Branje. 1999),
which was not captured by our design. We did not average out the youths’ scores over
time, for example.
In this research context, a longitudinal design comes with its own set of problems,
however. Repeated measures of youth-generated parenting styles will yield some amount
of change in reported parenting style across years and thus the proportion of the sample
that falls into any particular parenting style will shift in the aggregate. Such a study also
has higher youth attrition because in this age range, living arrangements are prone to
change significantly from year to year (Tapia, Alarid, & Hutcherson, 2015).
A final potential limitation of our study was that the effects of parenting styles on
delinquency might vary by neighborhood context, race, and/or ethnicity. Neighborhoods
and race/ethnicity were not central concepts in our study, but research on the differing
effects of parenting styles and delinquency suggest that authoritarian parenting may be
more necessary in socially disorganized neighborhoods or places where deviant behaviors
34 | JUVENILE AND FAMILY COURT JOURNAL

are more commonplace. Recent theoretical work suggests important distinctions in how
many African-American parents raise their children versus Caucasian parents (Unnever &
Gabbidon, 2011). In addition, past studies have found race-ethnic differences on attach-
ment and delinquency (McCluskey & Tovar, 2003), which also went unmeasured in the
current study. Therefore, future studies may wish to consider how race/ethnicity, neigh-
borhood variables, and living arrangements affect youth delinquency, and to explore
more deeply why fathers’ parenting styles had a greater influence on delinquency than
mothers’. Policy implications of our findings include encouraging more fathers of delin-
quent youths to attend parenting classes to better understand the negative effects of their
absence or abusive behaviors on child outcomes.

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