The impact of adolescent risk behavior on partner relationships

Abstract

Prior literature suggests that involvement in adolescent risk behaviors will have short-and longterm consequences that disrupt the orderly flow of later development, including impacts on patterns of partner relationships. In this study, we explore how adolescent involvement in delinquency, drug use, and sexual behavior at an early age affects the likelihood and timing of both marriage and cohabitation using a sample from the Rochester Youth Development Study. We also examine the direct effects of dropping out of high school, teenage parenthood, and financial stress during emerging adulthood as well as their potential role as mediators of the relationships between adolescent risk behaviors and partnering for both males and females. Overall, there is not very strong support for a direct relationship between adolescent delinquency, drug use, or early sexual behavior and patterns of partner formation. In contrast, the more proximal relationships, indicated by precocious transitions to adulthood and financial instability, are more consistently related to partner formation. These findings support models of cumulative disadvantage: early adolescent problem behaviors are weakly related to partner formation, but appear to set in motion cascading consequences that influence the transition to adulthood and, in turn, these more proximal variables are more consistently related to partner formation. Keywords HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Author ManuscriptThe life course approach places substantial emphasis on transitions, or short-term changes in the life course. Transitions represent movement along age-graded patterns of development, or trajectories, such as family, school, work, and romantic relationships (Elder, 1994). Marriage and, in today's society, cohabitation, are important transitions in one's life course and often influence how successful a person will be in adulthood. Understanding the origins of these transitions, therefore, is an important task for life course studies.Trajectories do not exist in a vacuum, however. Movement along one trajectory is expected to influence movement along other trajectories. More specifically, involvement in adolescent risk behaviors which compromise adolescent development (Busseri, Willoughby, & Chalmers, 2007; Jessor, 1998) can be conceptualized as their own life course trajectories (Thornberry & Krohn, 2001). As such, we would expect early involvement in these risk behaviors including delinquency, drug use, and risky sexual behavior to influence transitions into other trajectories such as establishing a relationship with a significant other. However, relatively little theoretical and empirical attention is given to the impact of engagement in adolescent risk behavior on patterns of partner formation (King & South, 2011). The current study addresses this issue by focusing on how adolescent risk behavior impacts the likelihood of forming an intimate relationship with a significant other and whether that relationship is formalized t...

Criminal careers and demographic outcomes: An introduction to the special issue

“…Specifically, criminal involvement leads to an earlier transition to marriage in both Norway and the UK (Lyngstad & Skardhamar 2015;Schoon & Mullin 2016). However, these results seem to hold only for adult behaviors, as adolescent risky behaviors (including crime) have no effect on early marriage in a US sample (Thornberry et al 2015).…”

“…Thornberry et al (2015) find that adolescent risky behaviors (including crime) are not related to what they call phrased stable relationships (cohabitation and marriage) for neither men nor women, but that serious delinquency increase the risk of early cohabitation for men. However, as Zoutewelle-Terovan et al (2015) show for the Netherlands, a history of crime in young adulthood reduces the likelihood of engagement in a relationship of any type (marriage, cohabitation or non-cohabitation).…”

“…Marriage outcomes are studied by Lyngstad and Skardhamar (2015), Besemer, Farrington and Theobald (2016), Schoon and Mullin (2016) and Thornberry et al (2015). Generally, these studies find that crime (in adolescence and later life) is not related to the overall likelihood that someone enters a marital union.…”

Family formation: A positive outcome for vulnerable young women?

“…Childhood poverty and experiences of maltreatment are strongly associated with one another (Drake, Lee, & Jonson-Reid, 2009; Pelton, 2015). Despite this, little work (e.g., Allwood, & Widom, 2013; Colman, & Widom, 2004; Thornberry, Krohn, Augustyn, Buchanan, & Greenman, 2015) has been done on family formation for adults with histories of abuse or neglect and poverty. Prior studies have focused mainly on teen parenting or relationship quality among sexual abuse survivors.…”

The Effects of Age at Prison Release on Women’s Desistance Trajectories: a Mixed-Method Analysis

“…Given that, it is clearly not the structural role of motherhood that inhibits offending behavior, at least not for the crimes for which many mothers are serving sentences. However, as many crimeinvolved adult women were also teenage mothers [29,113], it may be the case that with age and maturity comes a readiness to adopt a prosocial identity, and reclaiming their role as mother may indeed serve to solidify their desired change [9,10,90]. Simultaneously, there are other studies that suggest that for women who acknowledge their motherhood status and wish to elevate its priority in their prosocial lives, being younger and less criminally enmeshed serves to increase the likelihood that motherhood will catalyze these desistance efforts [45,66].…”