Does Bonding with a Father or Mother Matter for Adolescent Boys or Girls? Measures on Their Delinquency Behavior

Background/Purpose: 

             Bonding with a mother, often treated bonding to both parents in literature, has been identified as the strongest predictor of delinquency in adolescents. A growing body of literature has identified the link between bonding with their parents and a juvenile’s delinquency behavior in the past decades. It wasn’t until 2015 that more efforts have been made to examine whether child’s bonding with a father or mother have a bigger impact to adolescents. However, differences in patterns of youth delinquency and problem behavior between boys and girls have been recognized due to the disparities in their biological development and personal relationship with parents. Therefore, less is known about whether bonding to a father or mother matters more for adolescent boys and girls. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the gender of adolescents and bonding to a father or mother regards to delinquency behavior.

 Methods:

      The data for this study comes from the 2010 Taiwan Children and Youth Life Condition Survey, a national survey for families with adolescents 12 to 18 years old, including 961 girls and 967 boys (N = 1,928). Bonding with each parent is measured through this self-report survey regarding their relationships with their parents. Children are asked for their involvement in a variety of delinquent behaviors in the past year, including alcohol consumption, smoking, substance abuse, stealing, gang involvement, and violent behavior. Poisson regression is conducted to test the relationship between delinquency, alcohol, and smoking behavior between adolescent boys and girls while controlling for other family characteristics.

 Results:

            Overall, bonding with a father matters more than to a mother regarding delinquency behaviors for all adolescent. Also, adolescent girls who had a better bonding relationship with their father were less likely to engage in delinquency, smoking and alcohol consumption. On the other hand, bonding to either parent did not show significant prediction in adolescent boys’ delinquency behavior. Surprisingly, bonding with a mother did not prove predicted in adolescent delinquency across different models in this study. Additionally, adolescent girls showed less delinquency and alcohol consumption if their fathers had a higher education background.

 Conclusions and Implications:

           Bonding with a father showed association with juvenile delinquency behavior, alcohol drinking, and smoking, especially for adolescent girls. Even though previous evidence showed adolescents with better bonding with their mothers are less likely to engage in juvenile crimes, the results are not consistent with the findings in this study. Embedded in different cultural contexts, relationships with parents have different meanings for adolescents, and that could contribute to the differences between Taiwanese and western societies. The parenting roles of fathers are easily overshadowed by the responsibility as the breadwinner in Taiwan. However, the bonding dynamics between fathers and adolescents could be more impactful than we think, especially for girls.