Conscience development among children of justice-involved parents: The role of timing of delinquency, and parenting

• In Event: Externalizing Behavior Problems in Early Childhood: The Role of Parenting Behaviors and Temperament

Abstract

Context. An estimated 33 million children in the U.S. have at least one parent with a criminal record (Vallas et al., 2015), one of the strongest predictors for developing antisocial behavior (Farrington et al., 2001). Most prior work on the intergenerational transmission of antisocial behavior has focused on adolescent offspring. Yet, we know from developmental research that the preschool period is crucial for socialization (Kochanska et al., 1994). In this study, we aimed to test whether, among families with a history of justice involvement, the severity of parental delinquency would be associated with individual differences in a developmental precursor to antisocial behavior, namely early conscience development.
Method. Participants in the Raising Our Children study are 96 parents (70% mothers) who were incarcerated as adolescents and followed longitudinally as part of the Northwestern Juvenile Project, as well as their 109 children (46% girls; Mage = 5 years, 4 months).
Parents self-reported their involvement in 40 acts of antisocial behavior (e.g., theft, assault, drug dealing, driving offenses), before and after their child’s birth. With a combination of direct observation and parental self-report, we measured children’s conscience development (including internalization of rules, concern for others, and affective discomfort after rule violation) as well as 5 dimensions of parenting: Positive engagement, mutually-responsive orientation and shared positive affect (MRO-SPA), inappropriate discipline, harsh parenting, and parent-to-child aggression.
We conducted structural equation models to test the potential mediating effect of the 5 dimensions of parenting in the link between parental antisocial behavior that occurred before the child’s birth (first model) and after the child’s birth (second model).
Results. Children’s conscience development was, as expected, higher among older children and among girls. We found that children’s poorer conscience development was associated with their parents’ antisocial involvement since they were born (B = -0.11, 95% CI= -0.21, -0.001), but not with their antisocial involvement before their birth (p>.10; see Figure 1). Parents’ antisocial involvement since the child’s birth predicted some parenting skills (i.e., harsh parenting and parent-to-child aggression), but those parenting skills did not predict the child’s conscience development (Figure 2). Only positive engagement predicted the child’s conscience development (Figures 1 and 2).
Conclusion. In families with a parental history of justice involvement, individual differences in children’s conscience development are associated with recent, not past, parental antisocial behavior. We did not find that parenting skills mediated that link. This suggests that other factors, such as genetic risk, or unmeasured family contextual variables, may explain this intergenerational continuity.

Authors

• Amelie Petitclerc, Laval University
  Presenting Author

• Yohann Courtemanche