Monitoring (tracking and surveillance) of children's behavior is considered an essential parenting skill. Numerous studies show that well-monitored youths are less involved in delinquency and other normbreaking behaviors, and scholars conclude that parents should track their children more carefully. This study questions that conclusion. We point out that monitoring measures typically assess parents' knowledge but not its source, and parents could get knowledge from their children's free disclosure of information as well as their own active surveillance efforts. In our study of 703 14-year-olds in central Sweden and their parents, parental knowledge came mainly from child disclosure, and child disclosure was the source of knowledge that was most closely linked to broad and narrow measures of delinquency (normbreaking and police contact). These results held for both children's and parents' reports, for both sexes, and were independent of whether the children were exhibiting problem behavior or not. We conclude that tracking and surveillance is not the best prescription for parental behavior and that a new prescription must rest on an understanding of the factors that determine child disclosure.

Parental monitoring has been conceptualized as tracking and surveillance but operationalized as knowledge of daily activities. This study tested the tracking and surveillance explanation of why parental knowledge is linked to better adolescent adjustment. Participants were 1,186 14-year-olds in central Sweden and their parents. The results supported and extended a reinterpretation of parental monitoring (H. Stattin & M. Kerr, in press). Across sex and informant, high parental knowledge was linked to multiple measures of good adjustment. But children's spontaneous disclosure of information explained more of these relations than parents' tracking and surveillance efforts did. Parents' control efforts were related to good adjustment only after the child's feelings of being controlled, which were linked to poor adjustment, were partialed out. The findings suggest that parents' tracking and surveillance efforts are not as effective as previously thought.

A commonly used measure of parental monitoring is parents' knowledge of adolescents' daily activities. This measure has been criticized on the grounds that parents get more knowledge about teenagers' daily activities through willing youth disclosure than through their own active monitoring efforts, but this claim was based on cross‐sectional data. In the present study, we reexamine this claim with longitudinal data over 2 years from 938 seventh and eighth graders and their parents. Youth disclosure was a significant longitudinal predictor of parental knowledge in single‐ and cross‐rater models. Neither measure of parents' monitoring efforts—control or solicitation—was a significant predictor. In analyses involving delinquency, parental monitoring efforts did not predict changes in delinquency over time, but youth disclosure did. We conclude that because knowledge measures do not seem to represent parental monitoring efforts, the conclusions from studies using these measures should be reinterpreted.

Although psychopathy usually is treated as a unitary construct, a seminal theory posits that there are 2 variants: Primary psychopathy is underpinned by an inherited affective deficit, whereas secondary psychopathy reflects an acquired affective disturbance. The authors investigated whether psychopathy phenotypically may be disaggregated into such types in a sample of 367 prison inmates convicted of violent crimes. Model-based cluster analysis of the Revised Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 2003) and trait anxiety scores in the psychopathic subgroup (n = 123; PCL-R > or = 29) revealed 2 clusters. Relative to primary psychopaths, secondary psychopaths had greater trait anxiety, fewer psychopathic traits, and comparable levels of antisocial behavior. Across validation variables, secondary psychopaths manifested more borderline personality features, poorer interpersonal functioning (e.g., irritability, withdrawal, poor assertiveness), and more symptoms of major mental disorder than primary psychopaths. When compared with the nonpsychopathic subgroup (n = 243), the 2 psychopathic variants manifested a theoretically coherent pattern of differences. Implications for etiological research and violence prevention are discussed.

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