Parenting and Punishment: How Sibling Troubles and Surveilling Institutions Shape Family Processes

• In Event: Drivers of Families and Households

Abstract

Existing research on parental investment and intergenerational transmission emphasizes between-family differences in such processes, especially as they pertain to parenting early in childhood. This article instead focuses on within-family dynamics and asks whether, in multi-child households, an older child’s life-course troubles motivate parents to recalibrate their parenting of their younger children. Using fixed effects models with the NLSY79-Child and Young Adult survey, I find that parents are particularly responsive to their older child’s criminal justice system involvement, revealing that youths’ system contact is focally responsible for shaping parental behavior rather than the behaviors often correlated with such contact. In particular, criminal justice contact of one’s older child leads parents to become less punitive toward their younger children. It also makes parents less willing to approach teachers for remedial support but does not decrease their general at-school involvement, a finding that helps reconcile competing accounts of system avoidance and selective engagement with surveilling institutions following familial criminal justice involvement. In doing so, this article demonstrates how two often-overlooked influences—siblings and social control institutions—interact to shape parenting and structure family life.

Author

• Garrett Baker, Duke University