Perceptions of parenting, social cognition and delinquency

Research has firmly established that family functioning plays an important role in the social and behavioural development of young people (for reviews see Farrington, 1996; Patterson et al., 1992). These reviews consistently show three aspects of parenting to be crucial: appropriate discipline, supervision, and warmth of parent-child bonds. However, until recently there was less research into the mechanisms that mediated this relationship. This paper proposes that the effect of early experiences on later adjustment are mediated by cognitive processes such as social information processing. Crick and Dodge (1994) proposed a six-stage model of social information processing, describing how information about the social world is perceived and processed, and how this is influenced by the individual's memories and past experience. Research has shown certain patterns of processing and cognitive distortions to be associated with antisocial and delinquent behaviour in children and adolescents, and that these are established at a fairly young age. This paper suggests that early socialization experiences play an important role in the acquisition of cognitive distortions. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.