Dev Psychol. 2015 Mar;51(3):301-8. doi: 10.1037/a0038672. Epub 2015 Jan 19.

The role of parenting in the prediction of criminal involvement: findings from a nationally representative sample of youth and a sample of adopted youth.

Beaver KM¹, Schwartz JA², Connolly EJ³, Al-Ghamdi MS⁴, Kobeisy AN⁴.

Author information

¹College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
²School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska.
³Department of Criminal Justice, Pennsylvania State University.
⁴Center for Social and Humanities Research, King Abdulaziz University.

Abstract

The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations-mainly genetic confounding-of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.