The Third Hand: How Should Parents Intervene When the Transition to Adulthood Goes Awry?

• In Event: 21010 - Social Context, Family, and Crime

Abstract

The extent to which we punish or support individuals who encounter significant personal and behavioral challenges is one of society’s great challenges. Accordingly, decades of public, political, and scholarly debate have been waged about the appropriate balance between the welfarist “left hand” and penal “right hand” of the state, yet the academic literature on the governance of social marginality has largely overlooked one massive social institution—the family—likely because it focuses largely on adults (whose parents are less relevant). In addition, the literature on parental investment has mostly analyzed very young children. This means we know relatively little about the emerging adulthood period, which is often a time of onset for new life-course troubles and is the period where the responsibility for intervention becomes increasingly unclear. Therefore, in this article I use a novel survey experiment of n=3,800 US adults to ask four research questions: (1) How do American adults think parents should allocate resources among their children when their older (high school age) child is entangled in one of these life-course troubles? (2) Do allocation preferences differ based on whether the (hypothetical) family is low versus middle income? (3) Do allocation preferences differ based on the demographics and socio-economic status of respondents? (4) To what extent does one’s support for funding of public institutions—both penal (police and law enforcement) and welfarist (childcare assistance, family welfare programs, etc.)—alter one’s preferences for private (i.e., parental) resource allocation?

Author

• Garrett Baker, Duke University