Introduction
Crime continues to be a social and economic concern globally and above all-weather a crime is committed by an adolescent or an adult, both are equally punishable. Today more and more children at a very young age have taken up the violent way as they are influenced by a lot of other factors like peer pressure, watching violent acts on the television, etc. It is a well-known fact that destructive behaviors are bound to harm both the individual and the community.
While several researchers are working on the issues related to early childhood delinquency and intervention programs, none of them have been standardized. Many of them point out that early intervention can help decrease childhood delinquency and behavioral problems. The purpose of the paper is to answer the above-mentioned questions if such childhood interventions can help prevent childhood delinquency and what the role of the family is in these interventions.
Main body
Even though the crime rates in recent years have decreased crime rates among young people have still not shown any marked decline. In addition, the seriousness of present-day juvenile crime has increased. Statistics suggest that the violent crime index for those who are less than 18 years had increased almost 50% between 1988 and 1992 (Snyder & Sickmund, 1995) and further increased by an additional 7% in 1994 (FBI, 1995).
However, it is important to understand that the vast majority of individuals in this age lack certain intellectual and psychosocial capabilities that need to be present to hold someone fully accountable for his or her actions under certain circumstances. These circumstances include situations that call for logical decision-making, situations in which the ultimate consequences of one’s actions are not evident unless one has tried to foresee them, and situations in which sound judgment may be compromised by competing stimuli, such as very strong peer pressure to violate the law. Interventions help the individuals and families to recover from such behavior and also further prevent them from it.
In recent years the American courts have seen that the number of child delinquents brought between 1990 and 2000 has increased by three times and is a major cause of concern for parents, teachers, and society. Research also suggests that these children are more likely to go to become adult offenders and are more prone to become serious, violent, and chronic offenders than adolescents whose delinquent behavior initiates in their early teens.
Most of the intervention strategies are designed in such a way that they are concern with correcting persistent problem behaviors in children. This is done by targeting resources at preventing this behavior from occurring in younger age groups which may prove beneficial in later stages. Before getting into the interventions it is important to understand the links between gender, low intelligence, poor school achievement, aggressiveness, and poor inter-social skills. There are also certain family-related reasons such as large family size, low socioeconomic status, low educational attainment among parents, poor parenting skills, and criminality among the family members. Additionally, community factors include poor schools, poor housing, lack of employment opportunities, and a lack of positive role models.
There are several programs for young children and their families that have helped to reduce delinquent behavior. However, the main problem here is the years of follow-up studies that require continuous monitoring. The fact is that most early childhood interventions were planned with goals other than delinquency in mind and hence the data regarding the same is very scarce. In general, most of these programs are aimed are creating a positive growth and development atmosphere.
The power of early intervention was not known until the 1960s when this type of program was initiated to improve the child’s smartness and cope with the pressures in academics. For instance, the researchers of the High/Scope team are most appreciated in this context.
These initiatives resulted in the realization that a quality preschool experience would reduce criminal behavior. Besides, a good family support program such as the Yale Child Welfare Project has helped several children. This project involved pregnant women and continued till 30 months age of the child. The Yale project aided in decreasing boys’ antisocial behavior as rated by teachers and increased the number of children with good school adjustment among both genders 10 years after program services ended (futureofchildren.org).
In yet another attempt at Syracuse University, the Family Development Research program that began involving young, poor, single mothers who were in their last trimester of pregnancy, it was found that most of them had not graduated from high school, and many had histories of arrests or court appearances (Lally, et.al, 1988). Later it was the paraprofessionals who worked with the families who encouraged the development of good mother-child relationships. Their efforts through the combination of attention to parent and child were supposed to change the environment of the home and to allow parents to support their child’s development.
They found that such an attempt was successful but with some drawbacks. For instance, though the children did not do much better in school than the control group of children, they were less likely to be seen at the county probation department. Further, it was also found that between the ages of 13 to 16 children in the sample group, only 6% of the center children had been processed as probation cases when compared to 22% of the control group of children. It was also found that this intervention reduced the penal costs for each child.
Similar to the Yale program, the Houston Parent-Child Development Center developed a parent-focused intervention wherein Mexican American families were involved (Johnson, 1989). Paraprofessionals with the help of home visits and weekend workshops for almost two years helped these families to learn child management techniques and to create a healthy home environment.
Both parents and children were attending the classes and when the children were in elementary school, they showed less aggression and fighting and were more considerate when compared to the control children. Though they found that the differences in aggression vanished between the age of 7 and 15 years after the program, they concluded that a good supportive home environment is essential in the prevention of delinquency.
According to the Nurse Home Visitation Program by the University of Rochester in addition to reducing delinquency among children, there was a drastic reduction in child abuse. They worked to provide prenatal support and good baby care to poor teenage mothers (Olds, 1988). Intervention by the home visitors also helped to strengthen the family’s formal and informal support systems within the community.
They found that with the reduction in child abuse, there was a simultaneous reduction in childhood delinquency and later criminality (Lewis, et.al., 1989). The findings of the Gutelius Child Health Supervision Study were also in similar lines (Gutelius, et. al., 1977). They offered support services to poor, single teenage mothers. The results from this study showed fewer behavior problems than did the control children of the age of 5-6 years.
Conclusion
Therefore, in conclusion, it can be said that intensive parent education, together with other family supports, seems to have lowered the risks of childhood delinquency. Most of the studies have pointed out that quality early childhood intervention programs show primary prevention of childhood delinquency. Parents play a major role in creating a positive atmosphere and supportive nature for the good development of children.
Though most of these studies were not directly linked to reducing child delinquency, it was indirectly linked to the decrease in delinquency. Studies have found that most of the delinquency risks are school-linked, such as grade repetition, absenteeism, and dropping out. However, there is still a need for evidence that early intervention programs help delinquency reduction. This is possible only through further research as it will allow researchers to provide the primary prevention which supports constructive behaviors and minimizes destructive ones.
Work Cited
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