Neighborhood Disadvantage and Parenting: Behavioral Genetics Evidence of Child Effects

The criminological literature has a long tradition of emphasizing the socialization effects that parents have on children. By contrast, evidence from behavioral genetics research gives precedence to child effects on parental management techniques over parental effects on children's outcomes. Considering these diverging lines of scholarship and literature, the current study explores a novel hypothesis that child effects on parenting may be conditioned by the level of the disadvantage of the neighborhood in which the child's family resides. By using measures of perceived parenting as dependent variables, the researchers analyze data on 733 same-sex sibling pairs derived from the Add Health study by taking advantage of the DeFries-Fulker analytical technique. The results show that in adequate neighborhoods, between 43% and 55% of the variance in the measures of perceived parenting is due to genetic factors, whereas shared environmental effects are negligible. In disadvantaged neighborhoods, genetic effects are negligible, whereas shared environmental influences account for between 34% and 57% of the variance in perceived parenting. These results offer partial support for the contextualized gene-environment correlation, which provides initial evidence that although both parental socialization effects and child effects exist, these effects can be modified by the context.