Parental control of teenagers in primary and high school and related deviance

Abstract

The construct of parental knowledge, a measurement of the child's ratings of parental familiarity with what one is doing, is frequently used in criminological research on the subject of surveillance/monitoring of the child. This construct is often compared with the self-reported delinquency. The paper presents the results of SPMAD - Study of parental monitoring and adolescent delinquency, which was carried out in early 2011 in Ljubljana, with a total of 409 primary- and 409 high school students participating in the study. The results show that higher parental supervision is still associated with lower rates of self-reported binge drinking and drug use in general, and to a lesser extent with cigarette smoking and consumption of marihuana. We also found out that the level of direct and indirect parental control (control in person and a call on a mobile phone) is significantly diminished with the increased age of adolescent which implies different parental control monitoring methods in the two groups of adolescents.