Parenting Practices in Response to Neighbourhood Safety Perceptions

The family plays a crucial role in a child’s development, particularly through socialisation and the transmission of values during early childhood. These experiences shape personality and later behaviour. Early family influences affect attitudes, beliefs, interactions with society, and research confirms that parenting style is an important predictor of future behaviours, including delinquency (Farrington, 2011).

Parenting style refers to a relatively stable pattern of parental behaviour. According to Baumrind’s classification (1971, as cited in Westbrook & Jones Harden, 2010), there are four main styles: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful. Authoritative parents display a high level of emotional warmth and control, whereas authoritarian parents exhibit high control but low warmth. Permissive parents are warm but exert low control, while neglectful parents are characterised by low warmth and control. The authoritarian style is associated to aggressive behaviour and delinquency, as children often learn aggression by observing their parents. A similar risk occurs with the permissive style, which fails to establish clear rules and boundaries. In contrast, the authoritative style reduces aggression and delinquency through warmth and clear boundaries.

The family bridges the child and society, reflecting social and cultural influences. Exposure to danger in the neighbourhood can cause parents to feel powerless, mistrustful, and isolated, leading to stress, marital conflicts, and reduced parenting effectiveness—all of which may hinder the child’s adjustment (Rezo et al., 2019). The neighbourhood influences young children more indirectly, through parental behaviour and family functioning. Parents control and supervise children’s activities both inside and outside the neighbourhood, which makes their role in early development more significant than that of peers or neighbours (Jocson & McLoyd, 2015). Neighbourhood characteristics correlate with parenting. Although the family home is often seen as safe place, research shows household boundaries are permeable, and adverse neighbourhood conditions, violence, and crime can hinder child development (Farver et al., 2005). Among various neighbourhood factors, parents’ perception of neighbourhood danger plays an important role in influencing parenting style or specific parental behaviours, thus indirectly affecting children’s development.

Parents living in unsafe neighbourhoods are more likely to use physical punishment and show lower emotional warmth towards their children (Furstenberg, 1993; Gonzales et al., 2011). These parents also tend to exercise stricter control over their children’s behaviour, exhibit verbal aggression more frequently, and set more rules within the family. Overall, living in more dangerous neighbourhoods is associated with a more authoritarian parenting style (Furstenberg, 1993). This parental behaviour results from adaptation, as parents teach their children to protect themselves from potential neighbourhood dangers. However, research findings on the link between neighbourhood characteristics and parenting behaviours towards children are inconclusive. Awareness of neighbourhood danger can lead parents to exercise stricter control over their children’s behaviour, as well as greater emotional warmth and support. In high-risk areas, parents tend to keep children closer to home, supervise them more closely, and sometimes seek safer environments outside the neighbourhood; heightened safety concerns also increase parents’ need to support and closely monitor their children’s daily activities (Gonzales et al., 2011). Most of the cited research was conducted in the United States, where crime rates are higher than in Croatia; thus, the findings should be interpreted with caution.

Research conducted in Croatia (Bojčić, 2024) shows that the majority of respondents perceive a low level of danger in their neighbourhood, with nearly one-third reporting no threat at all. Most participants do not fear attacks or robberies on the streets of their neighbourhood, either during the day or at night when they are accompanied by others. Notably, respondents trust neighbourhood safety more than their homes. These confirm that Croatian citizens view their neighbourhoods as relatively safe.

Higher perceived danger is associated with less authoritative and more authoritarian parenting, aligning with previous research that shows parents who perceive their neighbourhood as more dangerous tend to demonstrate less emotional warmth and exert stricter control over their children, likely believing that strict rules are necessary for their protection.

The findings are most commonly explained through the Family Stress Model, which highlights that living in an unsafe neighbourhood increases parental stress levels, leading to reduced emotional warmth and difficulty maintaining a balance between support and setting boundaries in parenting (Masarik & Conger, 2017). Parental stress often triggers physiological and psychological responses that negatively affect mental health, reducing parents’ ability to regulate their emotions and reactions towards their child. This may increase the tendency to use physical punishment as a response to inappropriate child behaviour. Such parenting patterns not only harm children’s emotional development, but can also have long-term negative effects on their physical and psychological development, perpetuating a vicious cycle of adverse experiences and behaviours within families and communities (Chang et al., 2016; Farver et al., 2005).

These insights emphasize the necessity of preventive measures that target not only the child and family but also the neighbourhood as a social framework influencing parenting practices. Since most respondents perceive a low level of danger in their neighbourhoods, preventing inappropriate parenting practices could be most effectively achieved by supporting parents in realistically assessing actual risks and building a sense of security. This approach could reduce feelings of helplessness, stress, and reliance on authoritarian parenting, thereby further strengthening positive parenting and potentially contributing to the overall development of the child within a safer community.

References

Bojčić, K. (2024). Percipirana opasnost u susjedstvu i odgojni stil roditelja. Policija i Sigurnost, 33(3), 237–248. https://doi.org/10.59245/ps.33.3.1

Chang, L.-Y., Wang, M.-Y., & Tsai, P.-S. (2016). Neighborhood Disadvantage and Physical Aggression in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Multilevel Studies. Aggressive Behavior, 42(5), 441–454. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21641

Farrington, D. P. (2011). Family influences on delinquency. In D. W. Springer & A. R. Roberts (Eds.), Juvenile justice and delinquency (pp. 203–222). Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

Farver, J. A. M., Xu, Y., Eppe, S., Fernandez, A., & Schwartz, D. (2005). Community Violence, Family Conflict, and Preschoolers’ Socioemotional Functioning. Developmental Psychology, 41(1), 160–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.41.1.160

Furstenberg, F. F. (1993). How families manage risk and opportunity in dangerous neighborhoods. In W. Wilson (Ed.), Sociology and the Public Agenda (pp. 231–258). SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483325484

Gonzales, N. A., Coxe, S., Roosa, M. W., White, R. M. B., Knight, G. P., Zeiders, K. H., & Saenz, D. (2011). Economic Hardship, Neighborhood Context, and Parenting: Prospective Effects on Mexican–American Adolescent’s Mental Health. American Journal of Community Psychology, 47(1–2), 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9366-1

Jocson, R. M., & McLoyd, V. C. (2015). Neighborhood and Housing Disorder, Parenting, and Youth Adjustment in Low‐Income Urban Families. American Journal of Community Psychology, 55(3–4), 304–313. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-015-9710-6

Masarik, A. S., & Conger, R. D. (2017). Stress and child development: A review of the Family Stress Model. Current Opinion in Psychology, 13, 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.05.008

Rezo, I., Rajter, M., & Ajduković, M. (2019). Doprinos modela obiteljskoga stresa u objašnjenju rizika za zlostavljanje adolescenata u obitelji. Društvena Istraživanja, 28(4), 669–689. https://doi.org/10.5559/di.28.4.06

Westbrook, T. R., & Jones Harden, B. (2010). Pathways Among Exposure to Violence, Maternal Depression, Family Structure, and Child Outcomes Through Parenting: A Multigroup Analysis. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 80(3), 386–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2010.01042.x