Introduction

Has parenting changed over recent decades? Do parents supervise and control their offspring more or less closely than they used to? Do they show more or less parental involvement? Spend more or less time in caring for young people, in conversation and joint activities? The period from 1970 to the end of the 1990s saw a rise in behaviour problems by young people. Over the same period there were dramatic changes in family size and structure, and in the working lives of parents. Understandably, people have questioned whether there is a link between these trends. Debates have raged over a possible decline in family values and structures, the implications of working parents, the role of fathers, or the length of time children spend in daycare. But are these concerns well-founded? What evidence do we have for thinking that parenting is changing? And what do any changes actually mean for young people, especially those aged between 10 and 20 years old?

As part of the Nuffield Foundation's Changing Adolescence Programme, Professor Frances Gardner, Dr Stephan Collishaw, Professor Barbara Maughan and Professor Jacqueline Scott, from the Universities of Oxford, Cardiff, King's College London and Cambridge respectively, undertook a study of time trends in parenting. The project focused particularly on the relationship between parenting and behaviour problems in teenagers. As Stephan Collishaw demonstrated in Chapter Two, UK adolescents’ ‘externalising’ behaviours such as lying, stealing or disobedience, as rated by parents when their children were aged 15/16 years, rose through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, levelling out and falling slightly in the 2000s. We know that parenting styles influence the development of youth anti-social behaviour at an individual level (see, for example, Loeber, 1990). However this study by the Gardner team for the Nuffield Foundation is the first study to examine whether there is evidence for change over time in parenting practices and relationships, and to explore whether these might explain generational changes in rates of adolescent problem behaviour.