by James Plourde of The Register-Guard
A sizable fraction of today’s young boys will become tomorrow’s delinquents. Dr. Gerald Patterson is trying to figure out which ones.
“Anti-social behavior by young boys can be prototypic of adolescent delinquency–it’s really a juvenile form of the same thing,” says Patterson, a research scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center in downtown Eugene. “What we’re trying to do here is predict which 10-year-olds are going to become those adolescent delinquents.”
Patterson and his colleagues received a big boost in pursuing those predictions recently when the National Institute of Mental Health awarded the non-profit research center a 5-year, $4.4 million grant to continue a study on the causes of boys’ anti-social and delinquent behavior.
The study focuses on more than 200 Eugene-area boys and their families. The newly funded portion of the study strives to better understand and predict delinquent behavior.
The study, says Patterson, is not without social relevance.
“Three out of four anti-social adolescents grow up to be extremely maladjusted adults,” he says. “It’s very costly to society. They really represent a major mental health problem.”
Patterson sees a possible solution in better parent training. Good parenting, he says, is a difficult skill, not an instinct. He envisions a day when parent training is taught to high school students and young families.
In the center’s original study, also supported by NIMH funds, researchers went into the families’ homes and observed and recorded family interactions. Common parenting weaknesses noted in some of those families, says Patterson, included a lack of supervision, poor disciplining skills, limited problem-solving ability, and a tendency for parents to be uncommunicative with their sons.
The original study applied a distinctive “multi-layered assessment” by combining the accounts of domestic disputes as given by the boys, their peers, their parents and their teachers, in addition to incorporating the boys’ academic and police records. The study represented the first time, says Patterson, that NIMH provided funds for a research group seeking to statistically “measure what a family is.”
The original study has followed the boys up to the sixth grade; the newly funded portion of the study will track the boys and their families through the 10th grade.
Even by the sixth-grade level, says Patterson, problem boys exhibit a “transition to delinquency” that begins with peer rejection–other kids don’t like them–and progresses to hanging out with the “wrong crowd” and then to a police record.
“Anti-social behavior (among boys) is a process that builds and expands; it’s a cascading of (negative) effects,” says Patterson. “It leads to deviant behavior and to depressed moods. It’s just a miserable life.”
The learning center received two additional NIMH grants. One, for $567,000, involves an intensive, three-year, follow-up evaluation of a group of children with conduct problems. The study compares the effectiveness of social learning techniques with more traditional family therapy models.
A third grant, for $589,000, funds a two-year project to study the long-range effects of marital separation on families.
The Oregon Social Learning Center, located upstairs from the Fifth Pearl shopping mall, employs 83 people and operates on an annual budget of around $2.5 million, said administrator Gerry Bouwman. The center also operates the Patterson Annex, a facility that provides specialized foster care for teenagers who have been in trouble at home or with the law.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1988, The Register-Guard, www.registerguard.com.