Research That Matters (January 17 - 20, 2008)

Purpose: How young adolescents and parents share – or do not share – decisions about aspects of youth and family life is considered an important indicator of family process. Young adolescents who make decisions without parental input are more likely to become delinquent and less likely to complete schooling. Prior research on the determinants of decision patterns has largely focused on parental, family-level and environmental factors, and the assumed relationship with subsequent child behavior is that the decision-making patterns shape, rather than reflect, children's behavior. However, recent attention to the role of children as active agents within their environments suggests that questioning the assumption that sharing of decisions is a parent-led process is warranted. In this study, we examine ways in which children's characteristics and actions may shape family decision-making processes. Specifically, we examine how family decision patterns reported by young adolescents vary as a function of prior socio-cognitive functioning and behavior.

Methods: The sample consists of 2632 young adolescents whose mothers are respondents of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). This study's outcomes of interest are whether decisions about young adolescents' lives are made autonomously by the young adolescents (“sole decisions”), jointly by parents and youth (“shared”), or solely by their parents (“parent”). These outcomes are predicted by a set of cognitive and psycho-social measures observed prior to the outcome wave. Individual models are used to test whether traits predict decision patterns and sibling fixed-effects models allow us to estimate effects of child characteristics net of stable family contributions.

Results: Three predictors are significant in both the individual and sibling fixed effect models, suggesting that these relationships are robust and exist net of consistent unobserved effects of the parent, family, or environment. Children with high verbal aptitude (PPVT) share more decisions with their parents. Children with high mathematical aptitude (as measured by the PIAT-M) make more decisions autonomously. More impulsive children are more likely to make decisions without consulting parents, an effect that is concentrated among children of less-educated mothers and stronger among single-mother, relative to two-parent, households.

Conclusions and implications: Our findings add more information about how decision-sharing patterns may arise and as such suggest that this linkage between autonomy and delinquency may be more nuanced than previously acknowledged. Earlier work on single-parent families and the “control” of adolescents suggested that family structure mattered, and that single-mothers were less likely to be able to “control” adolescents. Our findings reveal that control matters when a counteracting force is necessary. When claims for autonomy are made by impulsive children, mothers likely to have lower resources are unable to counteract young adolescents' desires for autonomy. This more nuanced view of the role of parenting suggests that prevention practices should include an assessment and self-assessment of parents' ability to respond to their children's demands for autonomy.