Parental Involvement as a Protective Factor During the Transition to High School

Introduction

There is considerable evidence to suggest that parents have a stronger influence on their adolescent's behaviours than they may perceive. Greater parent involvement, boundary setting and parental supervision are associated with less risky adolescent behaviour. In an effort to improve adolescent risk behaviour on the road, Youthsafe has undertaken a multistrategic approach to equipping parents to better support safe road behaviours in their teenage children. Program components include parent resources developed and distributed to specific target groups, including those from rural and urban NSW and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, with appropriate media coverage. This presentation will discuss the influence of parents as a protective influence on young people's risk of road trauma and the approaches Youthsafe have adopted to address this.

Discussion

Youthsafe is a not for profit organisation that supports the prevention of serious injury in young people in transport, work and sport and recreational settings, but by far the highest proportion of unintentional death and injury for young people happens on the road. Youthsafe addresses youth injury prevention by developing educational initiatives and supporting organisations and individuals who are in a position to influence young people - including parents. This paper presents evidence that parents have a stronger influence on young people's behaviour than may generally be perceived. Parent involvement, supervision and boundary setting have been shown to support less risky behaviour in adolescent children and young people while lower levels of monitoring and involvement have been associated with risk taking and anti-social behaviour. This paper focuses on two critical periods when young people are moving to a higher level of independence - the first is young people who are new to driving and the second is for adolescents making the transition to high school . This paper also describes the multi-strategic approach Youthsafe has adopted to support parental involvement and includes our initiatives to address equity for parents in CALD communities.

Parental Involvement And Risky Behaviour

Influences on adolescent development are biological, cultural, educational, social and environmental. Of interest here are findings that link supportive parenting, particularly parental involvement, with positive adolescent development. Evidence linking parenting style with adolescent risk-taking and anti-social behaviour is of interest for road safety research because risky and anti-social behaviours are associated with road injury. Before looking at findings drawn from the road safety literature, I'll briefly outline some general findings from longitudinal research that has looked at links between parenting/ parent involvement and young people's risky behaviour. Serbin & Karp's (2004) recent review of the literature identifies less parental involvement and lower levels of supervision as predicting behavioural problems in children. The literature broadly defines two areas of risk associated with poor parenting - specific risk which is the tendency for children to adopt their parent's risky behaviour patterns and general risk which is associated with increased risk for negative outcomes such as childhood injury, adolescent risk-taking behaviour, substance abuse and school failure (Serbin et al, 1991; Nagin & Tremblay, ...