Family ties, parental discipline, and delinquency: A study of youthful misbehavior by parochial high school students

Abstract

The links among family ties, parental discipline, as measured by the use of physical punishment, and self-reported acts of misbehavior have intrigued sociologists for almost 75 years. However, the available literature regarding the incidence of youthful misbehavior provides few insights into these putative links for families where the parents make the effort to send their child or children to a parochial school. To this end, a random sample of 74 high school students attending parochial school in a medium-sized southwestern city was obtained. Among the family ties variables, family activities was a more consistent predictor of adolescent misbehavior than youths' evaluations of their parents and the parental discipline variable was positively related to delinquency: the greater the use of physical punishments, the greater the delinquency. Although no causal significance is assigned to these findings, they do suggest that, first, what the parents of the parochial students in this study do is more important than how they are seen by their children; and, second, that some punishments, either in response to or as a preventive force against delinquency, may have just the opposite effect.