When looking for ways to prevent juvenile crimes, it is essential to take into consideration parental styles, relational modernity and structure family as a whole. Parents play a key role in an adolescent's development, and negative experiences can prove detrimental to this development. Is there a way to prevent or reduce juvenile delinquency with parental intervention? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the case of David O., we see a fifteen-year-old boy with a tumultuous relationship with his parents. This relationship was filled with neglect, abuse, and abandonment. He lacked “the security, love, and other emotional connections” (Singer 59) that would have helped him deal with the problems he had experienced during his adolescence. This adverse upbringing may have contributed to David's violent murder of his eight-year-old neighbor. What could have been done to prevent this crime? Could relational modernity have played a key role? If David had had a better relationship with his parents, this crime may never have occurred. Greater involvement in David's life could have led his parents to see the warning signs and intervene sooner. The ability to see the problems David was facing would allow his parents to take action before his problems worsened further. By examining different parenting styles, it is necessary to address how a parent's involvement in their child's life can influence or deter them from delinquency. There is also a need to be critical about exactly how influential this relationship is on the creation of delinquency. It is neither fair nor accurate to place all the blame for a teenager's crime on the parents. While they may play a role in the young person's development up to this point, there are also factors and circumstances that go beyond parental influence. This leads to the question of what interventions would have been successful in leading David away from this delinquency. There are a range of interventions that might have been an option had David's problems been recognized early, from therapy to removal from home. It is important to think in terms of what would have been most beneficial to David given his harmful home environment. By looking at the different types of interventions, we can speculate on which would have been most effective in preventing David's brutal act of violence. Integration of references: When examining the reasons for juvenile crimes, it is important to take into consideration the adolescent's relationship with the parents. Parenting style, supervision, and involvement, among other factors, directly impact child development. Negative experiences and exposures can be harmful to adolescents and can lead to delinquency. There are many studies that attempt to consolidate the relationship between different parental factors and juvenile delinquency. While there haven't been many conclusive findings, there is a lot to extrapolate from the research. Different parenting styles have been shown to be associated with higher levels of delinquency, but a significant relationship has not been found (Wittenborn 9). Permissive parenting and authoritarian parenting are related to higher levels of delinquency than authoritarian parenting. Permissive parenting, which can be indulgent or neglectful, can be harmful to a child's development. The poor parental care often observed in this type of parenting is “related tohigh levels of distress in adolescents” (6). This neglect, as seen in the case of David O., can lead adolescents to experience these negative feelings. Many studies have shown that while permissive and authoritarian parenting can influence the rate at which juvenile delinquency occurs, there are many other factors that have a negative impact. stronger correlation. These include parental supervision, parental rejection, and parent-child involvement. Parental rejection, often observed in cases of abandonment, is a strong predictor of juvenile delinquency. Those who experience parental rejection often adopt a more problematic disposition and are therefore more likely to be rejected by their parents (Wright i). This creates a cycle that intensifies over time, leading to further delinquency. Rejection by a parent is considered more deterministic of the child's likelihood of delinquency than parenting style itself. In response to neglectful parenting, we can look to the importance of relational modernity or the concept of “how problems in adolescence are recognized not only by young people themselves but also by adults in their lives” (Singer 85). There is a need to adults able to recognize the problems that adolescents experience to prevent these problems from degenerating into delinquency. In order for there to be timely intervention towards juvenile crime, adults must play a key role young people the help they need, whether it is family intervention, therapy or another form of treatment. Adolescents themselves are often not independent enough to seek help or treatment on their own catalyzed by an adult who recognizes that the child needs help dealing with family issues in relation to juvenile delinquency, there are many possible avenues of prevention and intervention that could take place. If you were trying to keep a child in your current home, one possible intervention strategy would be family therapy. Many aspects of family dysfunction exert important influences on future delinquent and antisocial behavior in adolescents. Studies show that “harsh and inconsistent discipline consistently predicts later delinquency and substance use/abuse” (“Family Therapy” 1). To intervene with this idea of ​​severe and inconsistent discipline, family therapy can be useful. This therapy could be directed, among other things, at disciplinary tactics within the family. Improving family functioning as a whole has been shown to “reduce problem behaviors in adolescents from dysfunctional families” (1). There are many different types of family therapy, but there are some that may be more helpful than others in the case of David O. One of these types is structural family therapy which focuses on families' coping skills and learning new ways to respond to situations. problems inside the house. This therapy places greater importance on the structure of the family rather than the problems of the individual, which means that “an individual's problems are amplified due to the structure and communication within the family” (Structural Family Therapy 1). This type of therapy can be beneficial to youth with delinquency problems as it addresses the larger problem at hand. Going beyond individual problems, this therapy looks at the family structure. The family influences all areas of the adolescent's development, thus reinforcing the benefits of this interventiontherapeutic. Another intervention that could be valuable in preventing juvenile delinquency would be the use of child protective services. By taking into account the risk factors associated with adverse parenting regarding the likelihood of delinquency, recognizing and removing a child from a harmful situation could help alleviate that situation. There is an obvious need to recognize problems happening in a home so that child protective services can get involved. While some may argue that removing a child from their home would cause further distress, it is important to think about how this would affect a child in an extremely adverse home environment. Thinking in terms of permanency planning, it is probably more important to get a child into a stable, safe home as soon as possible rather than to work to keep them in their current home with their biological parents. When dealing with cases of abuse and neglect, the impact of an external adult is crucial in helping the child get out of the dangerous situation. David O. Review: David O.'s parents neglected him from a young age, treating his siblings more carefully. In David's own words, “he felt useless and was told this often. [He] later believed that [he] was no good. (Reasons for crime 1). This type of negative feedback combined with a lack of attention created a space in which David could act to try to get his parents to notice. As David stated, he was the worst behaved of his three brothers, presumably in an attempt to get the attention he craved. This created a cycle similar to the one Wright mentions in Family Life and Delinquency and Crime: A Policymaker's Guide to the Literature. David responded to his parents' neglect by acting in such a way that he was further rejected by his parents. This was the perfect cycle to enable the creation of his delinquent behaviors. David's parents exhibited a parenting style that was a combination of authoritarian and permissive. Authoritarian parents are “often harsh and unfair in punishing their children” (Wittenborn 5). As David recalled in his written statement, the entire family was "verbally abused and discipline was generally administered with a belt, an extension cord or a 1x2 board" (Reasons for Offense 1). This extreme punishment is seen in this parenting style, often combined with a lack of emotion towards their children. David's parents also displayed some attributes of permissive parenting through the neglect they were shown. His parents appeared to operate in a binary style of parenting, with the father being more authoritarian and the mother being more permissive. David O. had a lack of relational modernity throughout his adolescence. His relationship with his father was poor at best and was often filled with abuse. There was often severe abuse and discipline in David's description of how his mother tried to protect his two brothers from mistreatment. David's relationship with his mother, on the other hand, was neglectful and led him to separate from her when his parents divorced. When this happened, he experienced severe abandonment, made worse by the fact that his mother took custody of his two brothers but sent him to live with his father. David stated that at that moment he felt “rejected, betrayed, alone and unloved” (Reasons for Offense 2). In addition to his relationship with his parents, David also had strained relationships with other adults, blaming this for a lack of relational modernity. The other major adults in his life were his abusive stepmother and his abusive minister. Those adultswho may have had the chance to produce relational modernity, mainly his grandfather and uncle, died while David was still young. David was devastated by their disappearance and said they were his only two friends. These two adults had the closest and healthiest relationship with David, but were unable to make a large enough impact on his life due to their deaths. Their disappearance early in David's childhood was another form of abandonment in David's eyes. His only two friends and the adults most likely to have been able to recognize David's problem were no longer in his life. Before the final crime, David began committing petty crimes. He started stealing and acting out at school to “attract any kind of attention” (Reasons for crime 7). David believed that these small slights would bring his father back to him. David recognized that when he misbehaved his father punished him and then followed that punishment with a kind of attention, "probably through no fault of his own" (7). David's misbehavior was a cry for help and attention from his father. If there had been a relational modernity, his father would have recognized this cry and could have intervened sooner. The ability to recognize the problems David was going through would allow him to help his son. In cases of abuse and abandonment, thinking about relational modernity is difficult. How could parents who are so harmful to their children be able to help them when they have problems? David desperately needed an adult who would recognize the problems he was experiencing and help him overcome them. Even though David grew up in a good community, it was “not enough to make up for his parents' neglect” (Singer 251). The impact a parent has on a child is critical to their development and is often underestimated. There is an obvious need to address what could have been done to prevent David O. from committing crimes. Could some prevention or intervention programs have benefited him? As for issues of relational modernity, many of these programs may have worked to prevent his crime. An example of an intervention that may have alleviated the problems David faced at home would be family therapy. If David's removal from home had not been an option, therapeutic treatment could have helped alleviate the problems he faced with his family. While individual therapy can also be effective, it is important to address the family as a whole. David's poor parenting and lack of relational modernity have largely been attributed to his crime. Looking specifically at structural family therapy, this intervention would benefit both David and his family. It focuses on coping skills and “learning new ways to respond” (“Family Therapy” 3). As seen in David O.'s written statement, he often acted out in an attempt to get his parents' attention. If his parents had been taught how to respond to this rebellion, there would have been an opportunity to break the cycle Wright mentioned regarding feedback of harmful behaviors and subsequent reactions from parents. Parent training is essential in general to know how to respond to adverse adolescent behavior. Another early intervention program that may have been helpful is the involvement of child protective services. If CPS had been aware of the abuse and neglect David faced at home, their involvement could have led to his removal from that negative environment. Although it is obviously impossible to know.