“A man is known by the company he keeps” is an old saying that has stood the test of time. Naturally parents are the first company that a child keeps, and this alone gives rise to an important question. What role do parents play in shaping the behavior of their children? No one is denying the role that society plays in influencing kids, but then, the fact cannot be denied that the first people a child interacts with are his/her parents. Kids soak in their first influences from the immediate family and deviant behavior in children also needs to be studied from this angle.

A case in point

Justin ‘Baby’ Bieber’s father recently defended his parenting skills on social media after being accused of encouraging his son’s deviant behavior. But what prompted him to defend his standing on a public forum? Bieber was recently arrested in Miami Beach area for DUI (Driving Under Influence) and admitted to the police that he had been smoking marijuana and had mixed the same with prescription drugs. Reports in the media suggest that he also bad mouthed the officer who stopped him. Before this incident, Bieber allegedly threw eggs at a neighbor’s house in Los Angeles and was under investigation by police in that matter. On another occasion the singer and his entourage smoked marijuana aboard a chartered jet while travelling to New York City.

The deviant ways of the singer has attracted the attention of First Lady Michelle Obama (America’s Mom-in-Chief), who said that the singer needed guidance and adult support. In an interview with Univision Radio host Enrique Santos, she was quoted as saying, “I would be very present in his life right now. And I would probably spend with him a good chunk of the time, just there to talk, to figure out what’s going on in his head, to figure out who’s in his life and who’s not.”

Nothing but the truth

Baby Bieber will soon be out of his teens and one cannot help but wonder if he is suffering from the effects of bad parenting. The answer can be found by studying the examples of Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Spears, and Miley Cyrus (to name a few). They all tasted fame at a tender age and lost a sense of direction somewhere along the way.

A study conducted by Professor Stephen Scott, director of the National Academy for Parenting Research, and his team, found out that parents who fail to discipline their kids are empowering a generation of angry children. The research suggests that children are twice as likely to be aggressive if they had parents who were violent, poor supervisors and lax in enforcing house rules.

Since family is the primary social interaction among children, parents are the first to form, or hinder their child's self-esteem; they create rules and an environment for their child to be classically conditioned through; and parents also mold their child's view on relationships (Engel, 2006).