Autonomy-supportive Parenting and Adolescent Delinquency

Criminologists frequently identify parenting as a significant influence in adolescents' decisions to conform to or deviate from normative expectations. Often, these scholars examine processes by which parental attachment, supervision, and coercion either inhibit or encourage adolescent delinquency. However, despite its prominence in scholarship on child development and its potential applicability to criminological theory, few criminologists have considered the part that autonomy-supportive parenting, or parenting practices that foster an adolescent's capacity for independent decision-making, might play in encouraging or inhibiting delinquent behavior. I propose specific hypotheses linking parental autonomy support to adolescent delinquency through theoretical mechanisms that are well-known to criminologists, including self-control, reactance, and peer processes. Multilevel regressions are then presented that model linkages between adolescents' reported exposure to early autonomy-supportive parenting (at ages 10-12) and their self-reported participation in common delinquency from ages 10 to 17, using data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (C-NLSY79). Overall, the findings suggest that early autonomy-supportive parenting is related to adolescent delinquency; however, the nature of this relationship depends upon whether the type of autonomy-supportive parenting is behavioral, communicative, or psychological, and depends upon the stage of adolescence examined. Finally I conclude with a brief discussion of implications and limitations of the findings and directions for future research.