Parenting Practices and Adolescents Friendship Networks.

Using data on 11,044 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the relationship between parenting practices and the composition of an adolescent's friendship network. In general, parent-child relationship quality, selecting a neighborhood because of its schools, and parents' supervision are negatively associated with having a more delinquent friendship network but positively associated with having a more prosocial network. These results suggest that parents have the capacity to shape the characteristics of their child's friendship networks, even after taking into account the likelihood that adolescents have friends who are similar to themselves. Key Words: delinquency, deviance, education, friendship networks, parenting practices. Scholars have long investigated the extent to which parents and friends influence adolescent behavior (Simons, Simons, & Wallace, 2004; Warr, 2002), but few have considered whether the effects of parents and friends on adolescent behavior may be connected. Indeed, parents may seek to direct their child away from the influence of delinquent friends and push them toward prosocial friends (Parke & Buriel, 1998; Warr, 2005). Although there is consensus that friends affect adolescent behavior, whether friends or parents are more influential is debated and there has been limited focus on parent-friend links. This study examines how and whether parents influence the composition of an adolescent's friendship network. First, the relationship between parenting practices and friendship networks matters because friends influence adolescent behavior (Giordano, 2003; Haynie, 2001; Haynie & Osgood, 2005; Warr, 2002). Furthermore, although some similarity between the characteristics of adolescents and those of their friendship networks can be attributed to the tendency of adolescents to select as friends those who are like themselves, parents may play an important role in this process (Giordano; Kandel, 1996). Second, it is useful to understand connections between parents and their adolescent child's friends because of recent debates about the relative influence of parents and friends on adolescent behavior (Kandel, 1996; Warr, 2002). Friends are especially salient to children during adolescence. Some scholars claim that the influence of friends exceeds that of parents during this developmental stage, although other evidence suggests that parents are more influential (Gecas & Seff, 1990; Harris, 1998; Thornburg, 1982). At present, connections between parenting practices and friendship formations are not well understood. Finally, sociologists have focused on predicting adolescent outcomes and have been less concerned with the process of relationship formation (Giordano, 2003). Developmental psychologists have been largely concerned with friendships among children and predicting social competence (Giordano; Parke & Bhavnagri, 1989; Sroufe, Egeland, & Carlson, 1999). In addition, conceptual frameworks typically stress the mediating effects of child behaviors in the relationship between parents and peers (Brown, Mounts, Lamborn, & Steinberg, 1993; Dishion, Capaldi, Spracklen, & Li, 1995; Hartup & Laursen, 1999). These approaches offer little consideration or evidence of the means through which parents may affect the friendship network characteristics of their adolescent children, after accounting for the likelihood that adolescents select friends who are similar to themselves or have been influenced by their friends already. Our study goes beyond extant research on the parent-friend link. First, we integrate theoretical perspectives from criminology (Hirschi, 1969; Nye, 1958) and developmental psychology (Parke & Bhavnagri, 1989; Parke & Buriel, 1998) to consider whether and how parents influence a child's choice of friends, even after taking into account self-selection into friendship networks and the influence of friends on an adolescent's characteristics. …