|
No single "silver bullet" produces a well-adjusted adolescent,
according to a team of sociologists reporting on the influence
of family, school, neighborhoods and friends on the lives of early
teens.
When these researchers examined which of these settings had the
greatest impact on the development of seventh- and eighth-graders,
they discovered that each played different roles in shaping the
mental health, social behavior and academic performance of children.
Richard Settersten, associate professor of sociology at CWRU
co-authored the article, "Some Ways In Which Neighborhoods, Nuclear
Families, Friendship Groups, and Schools Jointly Affect Changes
In Early Adolescent Development," with Thomas Cook and Melissa
Herman from Northwestern University and Meredith Phillips from
the University of California Los Angeles.
The researchers studied 12,398 seventh- and eighth-graders in
23 schools and 151 neighborhoods from Prince George's County,
Md. Their analyses, highlighted in the article that appears in
the July/August issue of Child Development, followed students
through middle school.
The project is one of several studies conducted by the MacArthur
Foundation's former Research Network on Successful Adolescent
Development in High-Risk Settings. Settersten was a postdoctoral
fellow with the network from 1993–95 before joining the CWRU
faculty.
"We know that social contexts matter a great deal for kids' development,"
Settersten said, "but the really important questions relate to
how social contexts matter, how different contexts matter in different
ways for different kinds of outcomes and different kinds of kids
at different points in their lives."
The researcher found that when considered singly, families impact
the mental health of the adolescent; the quality of the schools
influences academic performance; peers affect social behavior;
and neighborhoods shape school attendance and participation in
social activities.
But the settings themselves are also linked and have significant
joint effects on adolescent development. The strongest coupling
was between family and friend quality-where authoritative parenting
and extensive parent-child communications tended to produce children
who had lasting, stable friends with less deviant behaviors. The
next strongest connection was between school and neighborhood
quality.
These findings underscore the importance of taking a "whole child"
approach to child development.
"There seems to be no silver bullets that can radically change
young lives for the better," Settersten said. "Settings that are
developmentally sensitive matter and more of them matter more.
But improvements in one setting are not likely to dramatically
change the functioning of young people in multiple areas."
|
