4 - Juvenile Aggression at Home and at School

Summary

Introduction

The development of aggression during childhood and adolescence can involve broad changes in child behavior across multiple settings. The most significant settings are the home and school. Children's aggression in the home is often, but not always, related to their aggression at school. This chapter focuses on the development of aggression in relation to parents and siblings in the home, and to teachers and peers in the schools.

Another key issue is to establish the relative importance of age-related developmental factors and environmental influences in determining the expression of different forms of disruptive behaviors including mild aggression, serious fighting, and criminal violence. In this chapter, we focus on the stability of such aggressive or violent behaviors. Stability refers to the maintenance of similar behavior across different settings and across time. We examine which early behaviors predict which later ones and, particularly, the risk factors for the most dysfunctional developmental pathways. An important goal is to identify specific adverse developmental pathways so interventions can be designed to change behavior before a negative path becomes too firmly set.

The term aggression as used in this chapter encompasses acts of varying degrees of severity from the upper end of normative aggressive acts to physical fighting to delinquency and also crimes, including rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. Hamburg (1995) discussed the distinctions between these different but related constructs:

The historical roots of studies of youth violence in the criminology field have led to a focus on [violence and] crime as the basic construct [s]. Crime is a legal construct that varies across time, jurisdictions, and political climate. Therefore, [delinquency and] crime [have] severe limitations as [constructs] around which to build sound scientific theories and rigorous research on basic patterns of individual behavior. As a result, attempts to rely on the use of the crime construct have led to a semantic confusion that has greatly complicated the effective use of the psychological and biosocial literatures in trying to marshal relevant data, to sort out significant issues, and to determine their relationship to the available crime statistics. Aggression, which is highly related to, but [clearly] not the same as, violence, has been the construct that has been studied most widely in the psychological and biosocial fields. In those fields, the concept of intentional harm, which is central to definitions of violence, is captured by devising a range of subcategories of aggressive behavior.