Schools and the Pathway to Crime: A Focus on Relationships (excerpt)

Schools comprise a primary socializing context for children and youth. In many jurisdictions, schools operate in loco parentis – in the place of parents – while students are at school. Baumrind (1991) identified two important dimensions of parenting: providing love and being responsive, as well as guiding, setting expectations and limits for children’s behaviors. Therefore, if schools are expected to operate in loco parentis, they have some of the same responsibilities as parents for nurturing and supporting students, teaching and guiding them, and keeping them safe. Schools have long served as society’s institution for socialization, not only for academic skills, but ideally also for the social-emotional skills and moral development that are essential for healthy development and adaptation across the lifespan.

At school entry, there is a group of children who are unprepared for the academic, behavioral and social demands in the school setting and consequently vulnerable to experiencing problems and not engaging with school. Based on inadequate socialization within the family and/or daycare context, these children enter the school system with: an inability to regulate their behaviors and emotions, poorly developed executive functions, a lack of social skills, weak moral understanding and attitudes, and mental health problems (e.g., anxiety, oppositional behavior). As Dodge and colleagues (2009) note, the combination of difficult child factors and adverse social contexts sets up a developmental cascade of failure in family, peer and school contexts and risk of movement into antisocial and illegal behaviors, where alternate reinforcement processes attract the youth into crime. For children with these initial vulnerabilities, society depends on schools to be the socializing institution and to pick up where parents left off or were unable to establish a foundation for adaptive regulation and learning. When these children and families are surrounded with support, it can lead to changes in genetic expression and positive behavioral change, diverting them from a life of crime (Dodge, 2017).

- Debra Pepler, Ph.D., TMI Scientific Board Member, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University, Toronto, Ontario, and co-director of the Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network (PREVNet), Canada’s national initiative for bullying prevention.