Represented Briefly in the Narrative My Colleague

¶ … represented briefly in the narrative my colleague presented -- that explains how young people become delinquent. Boys from disadvantaged and dysfunctional families, in particular, the research shows, are apt to join up with gangs because in the absence of a father in the home they are looking for masculine role models. Children (boys and girls) that were abused and lived in an environment of violence are most apt to become violent themselves as they grow. This is well-known from the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature available in dozens of databases. The point of the first paragraph is succinct: when a kid has no family, he finds family wherever he can, and it may well be found in a gang environment. In the second paragraph the writer uses data from research in Korea which does not carry the same weight as the first paragraph. Well of course all the seeds for delinquency can be found in a non-functioning family situation anywhere, and when there is not love there is generally trouble. But using a Korean survey in which delinquents report their poor environments just doesn't have the same clout as empirical surveys done in America.

The value of the posting is that it spells out severe conditions in the home in which children becoming dysfunctional themselves, or violent, or antisocial in another harmful context. This response may be seen in some way as nitpicking, but when a writer is presenting important social science information based on research there needs to be more clarity and backup for contentions. In the third paragraph the post mentions "selection theory" and asserts that "selection theory says anti-social people tend to have big families, poor parental supervision…disrupted families and antisocial children." That passage is a gross misrepresentation of the group selection theory. In fact the group selection theory posits that "selective forces can in fact act on competing groups of individuals" and behaviors evolve out of those "selective forces" which "contribute to the persistence" of those group behaviors (Price, 2013). Hence, the forces of a violent family will, if the theory holds, contribute to the persistence of the offspring being like the parents in the family -- violent and dysfunctional in terms of making a contribution to society. Another angle on selection theory is that an individual can adapt to his environment, and delinquent boys apparently adapt to a violent lifestyle.

I have a suggestion for my colleague's post: expand upon Albert Bandura's social learning theory in the context of juvenile delinquency and dysfunctional families. The post claims that in the social learning theory children are "unable to learn appropriate behavior because of…" the poor examples / models they see in their parents. To a degree, the post is correct in that Bandura posited that people learn behaviors though observing other people. Bandura also asserted that the "…internal mental states are an essential part of the process" (Cherry, 2013). And the third main component of Bandura's social learning theory is that just because an individual learns something from observation, "…it does not mean that it will result in a change in behavior" (Cherry). So if the young man is from a violent family but he attends a school where the teacher is in fact a good model, technically the child could choose to model his own behavior after the teacher and not the alcoholic or neurotic father. Bandura asserted that the person must be "motivated to imitate the behavior that has been modeled" (Cherry). Hence, after the ugliness at home, a bright kid should be motivated to imitate his teacher's modeling.