Date of Conferral

9-22-2025

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Psychology

Advisor

Sandra Caramela-Miller

Abstract

Parenting styles, parent-to-child attachments, and parental involvements are contributing factors leading to juvenile delinquency. Adolescents are committing offending acts at a younger age, recidivating, and perpetrating with peers or parents. However, there is a lack of empirical research on juvenile perceptions of parenting, juvenile criminality, and desistance implications. The purpose of this interpretive phenomenological study was to explore past juvenile criminal offenders’ lived experiences and the corresponding influence parenting styles had on their deviant behaviors. Ainsworth and Bowlby’s attachment theory, Baumrind’s parenting style theory, and Bandura’s social learning theory provided a lens for examining young adults’ perceptions of parenting related to their juvenile offending past. The cognitive processing of seven young adult participants was gathered through semi-structured online interviews. The overarching themes discovered were parental engagement in crimes, little parental involvement, parental use of authority, lack of parental engagement in their child’s extracurricular activities, paternal influence on participant’s criminality, and participant’s co-offending with peers. Challenges disclosed by the participants were substance abuse, aggression, depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal. Participant responses were parallel with concepts from attachment, parenting styles, and social learning theory. Findings are consistent with current research for targeted prosocial rehabilitation efforts to achieve desistance and support healthy parent-child relationships. Public policy initiatives, social program development, and resources for juveniles and parents are critical to fostering positive social change, improving public safety through crime reduction by mitigating recidivism.

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