Socio-Cultural Factors: The Family and the Broken Home

In one line

What matters in a family is not whether it is intact but whether the child is supervised, whether the discipline is consistent, and whether there is affection and conflict, and a broken home with those things does better than an intact home without them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the family affects offending through supervision, consistency of discipline, parental affection, family conflict and parental criminality; the broken home as such is a weak predictor once these are controlled, and the finding that matters is that conflict within an intact family predicts delinquency more strongly than the separation of parents does.

The variables that actually matter

Supervision. Whether a parent knows where the child is, whom he is with, and when he will be home. This is the single strongest family variable in the research literature and it is the one most easily disrupted by a parent working two jobs.

Consistency of discipline. Erratic discipline, in which the same conduct is ignored one day and punished harshly the next, predicts delinquency more strongly than either strict or lenient discipline consistently applied. The child learns nothing from a rule that does not hold.

Harsh and punitive discipline. Physical punishment is associated with later aggression, and the association survives controlling for the behaviour that prompted it.

Parental affection and rejection. The Gluecks' five family variables, described in their chapter, include the affection of each parent for the boy and the cohesiveness of the family.

Conflict. Persistent quarrelling and violence between parents predicts offending strongly, and this is where the broken home finding is actually located.

Parental criminality. Having a convicted parent is among the strongest single predictors in the longitudinal studies. The mechanisms are disputed and probably several: transmitted attitudes, poorer supervision, the effect of a parent's imprisonment on the household's income and stability, and the greater police attention that a known family attracts.

And family size. Larger families show higher rates, most plausibly because supervision is spread thinner.

The broken home, examined

The popular claim. That children of separated, divorced or bereaved parents offend more.

The finding. There is an association, and it is much weaker than the claim supposes, and most of it disappears once conflict and supervision are taken into account.

Three refinements that a good answer makes.

Separation by conflict differs from separation by death. Where the household breaks up after prolonged quarrelling, the association with offending is real. Where a parent dies, it is markedly weaker. That difference alone shows that the mechanism is the conflict rather than the structure.

A high-conflict intact home is worse than a low-conflict separated one. This is the finding that most contradicts the popular position and it should be stated in terms.