Of course, criminal behaviour is not only in nature, but also induced or amplified by our
environment, especially from a young age. The way we interact with the world as adults is
established back from our schemas formed, lessons learned and habits planted as a child.
Consequently, it seems logical to blame parenting, or the absence of it, as the source for
juvenile criminality. One study has shown that children from fatherless families are three
times more likely to end up in prison by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in ordinary families (Harper and McLanahan). It has been propounded that parenting can mould a child by their actions since children mimic their parents’ behaviour, and when one or more of their role models are gone, children would become astray and more drawn towards crime.
Nonetheless, there may be other explanations to this phenomenon of “like father like son”. According to Steven Pinker in his book “The Blank Slate”, the psychological characteristics of a human being is 50% due to genetics, and 50% due to unique environments, while the influence of parenting is neglectable. His argument has been supported by various twin studies and adoptive studies, where siblings related by blood are always more identical to each other regardless of how they have been brought up.
This discovery is not contradictory to the results of Harper and McLanahan’s study, but rather provides an alternative point of view. The absence of fathers and juvenile delinquency can still be correlated with one another without being a cause-effect relationship. For instance, most single-mom families result from the father’s lack of responsibility and affection for others, hence we could speculate that their children would carry similar antisocial genes. Another possibility lies in the non-shared environment and the influence of peers: fatherless children have a higher probability of living in poverty and being exposed to the stigma of others in the neighbourhood. It takes not just the parents, but an entire community to raise a child, or to say, make a criminal.
(to be continued)
Sources:
Harper, Cynthia C., and Sara S. McLanahan. “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration.” Journal of Research on Adolescence, vol. 14, no. 3, Sept. 2004, pp. 369–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2004.00079.x.
Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. 2003. Penguin, 2019.
by Wenmiao DP20