“My studies show that parents play a big role, also after their children are teens,” says Eva-Lotta Nilsson, a criminology researcher at Malmö University.
Nilsson’s recommendation to parents of children aged 13 to 19 is to not withdraw the involvement they had when their teenagers were small children.
Since 2007 she has followed up how life has evolved for a random sample of children in Malmö. She used this study in her doctoral dissertation.
Nilsson has interviewed parents, asking what they know about their adolescents. She also obtained information about what the teens were actually doing for several days.
The researcher discovered:
The parents who know where their children are, who they are with and what they are doing are in a better position for protecting their children.
The researcher found a direct association between the degree of such parental attention and how much their kids eventually use alcohol and drugs.
“Parents can have an impact on which friends their children have,” says Nilsson to ScienceNordic’s Swedish partner forskning.se.
“Parents are especially important when bigger problems occur,” she adds.
More results of Eva-Lotta Nilsson’s research in Malmö:
The researcher has not compared various groups of youth. Instead, she followed up a random selection of youth for several years and registered how life played out for each of them individually.
As she sees it, there is a clear link between how much parents follow up their teenagers’ activities and how these kids fare.
She also found an association between the young persons’ moral values and whether they engaged in criminal activities.
The study found that even though a family lives in a problematic part of town, familial controls were more important factors than place of residence for whether life went well for the youngsters.
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