Parent and Family Factors

Research has demonstrated that youths who engage in high levels of antisocial behavior are much more likely than other youths to have a biological parent who also engages in antisocial behavior. This association is believed to reflect both the genetic transmission of predisposing temperament and the maladaptive parenting of antisocial parents.

The importance of some aspects of parenting may vary at different ages. For example, inadequate supervision apparently plays a stronger role in late childhood and adolescence than in early childhood. There is evidence from many studies that parental
use of physical punishment may play a direct role in the development of antisocial behavior in their children. In longitudinal studies, higher levels of parental supervision during childhood have been found to predict less antisocial behavior during adolescence. Other researchers have observed that parents often do not define antisocial behavior as something that should be discouraged, including such acts as youths bullying or hitting other children or engaging in minor delinquent acts such as shoplifting.

Research examining the mental health outcomes of child abuse and neglect has demonstrated that childhood victimization places children at increased risk for delinquency, adult criminality, and violent criminal behavior. Findings from early research on trauma suggest that traumatic stress can result in failure of systems essential to a person's management of stress response, arousal, memory, and personal identity that can affect functioning long after acute exposure to the trauma has ended. One might expect that the consequences of trauma might be even more profound and long lasting when they influence the physiology, behavior, and mental life of a developing child or adolescent.

Peer Influences

Antisocial children with earlier ages of onset tend to make friends with children similar to themselves. Consequently, they reinforce one another's antisocial behavior. Children with ADHD are often rejected due to their age-inappropriate behavior, and thus are more likely to associate with other rejected and/or delinquent peers. The influence of delinquent peers on lateronset antisocial behavior appears to be quite strong. Association with antisocial peers has been shown to be related to the later emergence of new antisocial behavior during adolescence among youths who had not exhibited behavior problems as children.

Less parental supervision allows youths to spend more time with delinquent peers. Thus, improving parental supervision may be an important way to reduce the effects of delinquent peer influence. Ongoing research is examining how neighborhood effects on antisocial behavior are mediated by the willingness of neighbors to supervise youths and possibly reduce the likelihood of association with delinquent peers in the neighborhood.

Socioeconomic Factors

An inverse relationship of family income and parental education with antisocial behavior has been found in many population-based studies. Across gender and ethnicity, much of the inverse relationship between family income and antisocial behavior is accounted for by less parental monitoring at lower levels of socioeconomic status.

Prevention and Intervention

In recent years, several effective programs and strategies to prevent youth violence have been developed and tested.

Pre-School Children

The Nurse Home Visitation Program, partly funded by the NIMH, is a 20-year model of research in which nurses visit mothers beginning during pregnancy and continuing through their child's second birthday to improve pregnancy outcomes, promote children's health and development, and to strengthen families' economic self-sufficiency. This program, currently underway in New York, Colorado, and Tennessee, appears to benefit high-risk families, particularly low-income unmarried women, reducing rates of childhood injury,

Child abuse and neglect, and other risk factors for early-onset antisocial behavior in children. Long-term follow-up of the children in two of the studied locations indicated that by age 15, they had fewer behavioral problems related to the use of drugs and alcohol, fewer instances of running away, fewer arrests and convictions, and fewer sexual partners, as compared to counterparts randomly assigned to receive comparison services.

Hawaii's Healthy Start Program is designed to prevent child abuse and neglect and promote child health and development in newborns of families classified as highly stressed and/or at risk for child abuse and neglect. Following a successful pilot study, this program is now operating statewide, and has inspired adaptations in other locations. The program uses a home visitation model to help family members cope with the challenges of child rearing, to teach effective parenting and problem-solving skills, and to link families to necessary services such as childcare, income and nutritional assistance, and pediatric primary care. After two years of service, mothers reported improved parenting efficacy, decreased parenting stress, more use of non-violent discipline, better linkage with pediatric care, as well as decreased injury due to partner violence in the home, as compared with a control group.