The nature of the association between parental rejection and delinquent behavior.

A panel design with approximately 300 adolescents was employed to investigate the relationship between parental rejection and delinquency. Previous studies have failed to control for potentially confounding family factors and have ignored the possibility that the causal priority is from delinquency to parental rejection, rather than the reverse. Parental rejection continued to show a moderate association with delinquency after relevant controls were introduced. The results were the same across sexes. LISREL was employed to estimate the parameters of the reciprocal relationship between parental rejection and delinquency. Analysis indicated that the predominant causal flow is from parental rejection to delinquency.