While the family can help neutralize the lure of the streets, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood places terrific strain on family functioning, especially in single-parent families that experience social isolation from relatives, friends, and neighbors. Children who are raised within such distressed families are at risk for delinquency.Footnote Ongoing studies by sociologist Rand Conger and his associates find economic stress appears to have a harmful effect on parents and children.Footnote According to his Family Stress Model of economic hardship, such factors as low income and income loss increase parents’ sadness, pessimism about the future, anger, despair, and withdrawal from other family members. Economic stress has this impact on parents’ social-emotional functioning through the daily pressures it creates for them, such as being unable to pay bills or acquire basic necessities such as adequate food, housing, clothing, and medical care. Disrupted parenting, in turn, increases children’s risk of suffering developmental problems, such as depressed mood, substance abuse, and engaging in delinquent behaviors. These economic stress processes also decrease children’s ability to function in a competent manner in school and with peers.
Adolescents who do not receive affection from their often hostile parents during childhood are more likely to use illicit drugs and to be more aggressive as they mature.Footnote In contrast, those growing up in a home where parents are supportive and effectively control their children in a noncoercive way are more likely to refrain from delinquency; this phenomenon is referred to as parental efficacy.Footnote Delinquency is reduced when parents provide the type of structure that integrates children into families, while giving them the ability to assert their individuality and regulate their own behavior.Footnote Children who have warm and affectionate ties to their parents report greater levels of self-esteem beginning in adolescence and extending into their adulthood; high self-esteem is inversely related to criminal behavior.Footnote