Assist an Adolescent to Increase Positive Affiliations

¶ … assist an adolescent to increase positive affiliations and, therefore, turn away from delinquent behavior. Compare and contrast these two strategies and explain why you selected each, with particular emphasis on how each would help an adolescent become a productive citizen.

One strategy to elicit positive behaviors from adolescents is that of operant conditioning, or rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior (Bartol & Bartol 201: 89). Parents often deploy this strategy because it seems both obvious and instinctive -- 'grounding' a misbehaving student, for example, while rewarding good grades with money, a trip, or a promised car. However, a more difficult yet ultimately rewarding strategy may be to strive to cultivate positive attachments for the adolescent, and foster good relationships between the parent and child through engaging in mutually supportive activities (such as having dinner together on a regular basis). Attachment theory suggests that delinquency is not caused so much by the absence of rewards for positive behaviors as it is the absence of affirmative relationships, particularly adult relationships. Insecurity encourages teens to 'act out' (Allen et al. 2002: 56).

Previous studies have indicated that insecure attachment experiences in adolescence often cause an increased tendency to use delinquency as a mode of self-fulfillment. If adolescents are insecure because parents and teachers do not support them during this critical time period when they are just developing a sense of self, they may seek an identity through delinquency. Delinquency also becomes a crude form of securing at least some form of attachment from parents or from the larger social order that the adolescent believes does not care about him or her (Allen et al. 2002: 57). Insecure attachments give rise to low self-esteem, which is also associated with delinquency. However, it should be noted that the theory of operant condition also allows for inadvertent encouragement of negative behaviors like delinquency through parental distance. It could be argued that a parent who ignores a teen except when the teen is in trouble in school is conditioning' that teen to continue to misbehave. According to attachment theory, delinquency is more of an unconscious form of self-expression, rather than the result of a 'conditioning' process (Allen et al. 2002: 63).