Getting Away With It

How did you measure punishment?
Since parents cannot legally stop financially supporting children until he or she is 18, we defined punishment as parents who stopped financial support after the age of 18 and reward as allowing the teen to say home with support after 18.

And what kind of conclusions did you draw from your results?
Well, first we need to revise our pessimistic view of parental influence on adolescents. We discovered that parents should be paying more attention to peer pressure and school policy in their younger children since parental behavior is just not going to be as strict. [And since parents will no longer be able to trust their own ability to punish effectively,] the more likely it is that influences like their friends and peers will have a stronger sway over them than in older siblings. And, society should exert a stronger pressure on parents in terms of parental reaction to teen pregnancy and dropping out of school. Society can help parents stay strong in the face of their natural urge to stop punishing. Society can do a lot in reinforcing the expectation of punishment and helping parents reduce their children's teen-pregnancy rates and high-school dropout rates.

Where else do you expect this kind of research to take you in the study of the games parents and adolescents play?
There may well be implications for repeating bad behavior. You want the parents to be harsh on minor infractions because if love dominates [and makes parents unable to punish their children adequately], teens will keep testing you, their behavior will escalate, and you will have no control. So we do think that a parent's reaction to behavior: 1.) Could indicate their preference on behavior. 2.) There's cross-behavioral spillover, but it's not as strong. Smoking might not lead to other risky behaviors like unprotected sex, but does that depend on how you deter the smoking? We want to look at that in our next study--how to correct repeating bad behaviors.

© 2008