Parents play an important role in a child’s development. According to Jennifer Morse, children from single-parent families are more likely to commit crimes than their counterparts from two-parent families. With two parents, an effective team is formed that ensures that a child grows with the necessary behavioral support and other mannerisms that a child learns at home and the society. If a child misses these vital development milestones, he or she is more predisposed to criminal activities. Morse cites various plausible links to the relationship between crime and single parenthood. This paper will use Morse’s article to provide a supportive argument to this relationship.
The nuclear family is ideally blamed for a variety of social problems that include delinquency. Classically, the good development of a child requires the presence of both parents. In fact, the occurrence of broken homes has been more common in delinquent cases than in non-delinquent cases. Two parents are able to monitor the behavior of a child more effectively than a single parent. With a single parent, the misdemeanor is bound to develop in a child without the parent noticing and this could go uncorrected and become more severe in the long term. The relatively low level of parental input that is often the case in a single-parent family accounts for the increased chances of juvenile delinquency. Academically, a child from a single parent family may attain lower educational achievements than their other counterparts. This is as a consequence of the parent not being able to spend efficient time in supervising a child’s academic progress. Thus, the child ends up with poor grades and has high chances of dropping out from school. Eventually, a child ends up frustrated and may end up in criminal behavior. On the same note, a child spends more time alone at home in a single parent family and is more likely to get into trouble especially in the adolescent stages. Such causalities make single-parent families one of the highest contributors of increased neighborhood crime rates. Father absence is found to be a key contributor in this regard.
The attachment between a parent and a child is found to be crucial in the sense that it reduces the chances of forming any attachment to criminal behavior. When a child has an attachment-disorder, he or she is a potential social danger as he or she does not care what anyone thinks about his actions. The foundation of this attachment is formed when a parent and a child stays together as in the case of a mother and her baby. This way, a child gains a lot of understanding about caring for other people and trust among other virtues. He eventually will care what his mother would think of him if he involved in deviant activities. This makes a child internalize the standards of good behavior which is less likely to change during the child’s growth. As the child grows, he will always tend to stick to the moral standards he learned from the connection with the parent.
No real policy has been imposed to ensure family dissolution per se but it is apparent that children growing in two-parent families stand in good stead to grow morally upright. This makes family matters a foremost social agenda that holds much significance in the society. While single parenthood may come as an alternative choice for anyone, it disrupts the normal sociopath of a child. It may not immediately affect the household that the child is growing in, but has potentially negative impacts in the long-term. The causal connections between delinquency and parenthood cannot be blatantly ignored given the rising rates of related crime most social setups.
