Parental Influences on Adolescent Involvement in Community Activities

Youth involvement in extracurricular activities reflects both family socialization influences and civic development. Parents can promote such activity through examples set by personal involvement in the community and through reinforcement of their children's interests. Using data (N = 362) from the 9th and 10th grade waves of the Iowa Youth and Families Project (Conger & Elder, 1994), we find that both the behavioral model set by parents and their personal reinforcement of children's actions make significant differences in the extracurricular activity involvement of boys and girls. However, parental reinforcement is most consequential when parents are not engaged in community activities. In this situation, warm parents are likely to reinforce their children, and this reinforcement strengthens children's involvement in community activities. The family dynamics of civic socialization deserve more attention than they have received to date. Article: American youth spend a substantial number of hours in extracurricular activities, including school-based clubs, school and local sports teams, and community-based organizations such as service clubs and church youth groups (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1992). A small but rapidly growing body of literature suggests that participation in both schooland community-based extracurricular activities is associated with and predictive of behavioral well-being among adolescents. hi particular, youth extracurricular involvement is frequently linked with academic competence. Adolescents' involvement in volunteer service or participation in church-sponsored activities is associated with better academic performance during high school and an increased likelihood of college attendance (Eccles & Barber, 1999). Student participation in organized sports has been linked with higher academic grades, greater expressed liking of school during the high school years, and an increased likelihood of college attendance (Eccles & Barber, 1999). Involvement in school-based extracurricular activities during adolescence appears to serve as a protective factor against early school leaving (Mahoney & Cairns, 1997; McNeal, 1995). Participation in leadership activities and clubs and special interest groups is associated with students' achieving higher academic grades, and having greater school engagement and higher educational aspirations (Lamborn, Brown, Mounts, & Steinberg, 1992). Less readily apparent benefits of civic participation include its potential to reinforce positive social values (Almond & Verba, 1963; Youniss, McLellan, & Yates, 1997) and set in motion a lifetime pattern of civic activity (Hanks & Eckland, 1978). Youth involvement in service activities meets community needs and applies principles and values that chart a lifetime course of adult development. Although the benefits of civic involvement to adolescents and communities are strong and far-reaching, such participation is not always without accompanying risks. Of particular concern are findings that adolescents who participate in organized sports activities, although benefitting academically from their involvement, may be at an increased risk for involvement in deviant behavior, and in particular higher levels of alcohol and drug use (Eccles & Barber, 1999). In sum, it appears civic involvement in general benefits adolescents academically and socially, but participation in organized sports activities may place certain youth at risk of increased drug and alcohol use. Given that the balance of research evidence suggests overall benefits of extracurricular participation during adolescence, investigators are now beginning to ask what factors may increase the likelihood that individual adolescents will choose to participate in such activities. Given the important role parents play in linking children to the world around them (Parke & Ladd, 1992), it is likely that children learn much about the value of civic involvement through the actions of their parents (Almond & Verba, 1963). We know that children tend to resemble parents in expressed commitment to educational (Featherman, 1980; Natriello & McDill, 1986) and religious (Acock, 1984; Cornwall, 1989) institutions. Research evidence using the same data set analyzed in this article has demonstrated that a good predictor of adolescents' own extracurricular participation is the community involvement of their parents (Chan & Elder, 1999; Elder & Conger, in press). Theoretically, parents who believe in the value of civic participation, yet are prevented from acting on their beliefs, could find means other than their own examples to encourage children to take full advantage of community opportunities. In this article, we are interested in identifying ways in which parents might influence offspring extracurricular involvement that were conceptually distinct from parents' own levels of civic participation. To identify such potential parental influences, we referred to previous empirical research documenting linkages between parenting and child extracurricular involvement, to theoretical work distinguishing between stylistic versus behavioral aspects of parenting, and to the work of Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1986), emphasizing the importance of considering ecological contexts in which influences on child development occur. The one study that has attempted to identify parental influences on child activity involvement (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1993) found that the participation of gifted youth in activities that support their talents is supported by parents who are warm and involved in their children's lives and who actively reinforce their children's activity participation. Interestingly, these two components, parental warmth and parental encouragement or reinforcement, fall into two conceptually distinct categories of parental influences. Warmth is typically considered a stylistic aspect of parenting. By contrast, parents who explicitly reinforce children to become involved in community activities are engaging in a type of parenting practice. Parenting style is typically conceptualized as describing a general emotional climate within the home. This emotional climate depends on where parents fall on general dimensions of parental emphasis, such as warmth, behavioral control, or psychological autonomy granting, Warm and responsive parents may differ in the specific manners in which they interact with their children, but all wain parents share an underlying emphasis on concern for and responsiveness to children's specific needs. In contrast, parenting practices are the specific, goal-directed behaviors that parents exhibit with their children. The distinction between parenting styles and practices is significant (Darling & Steinberg, 1993), and the manner in which the two work together can be complex. For example, authoritative parents (a parenting style that ranks high on warmth and limit-setting) are more likely to be involved in their adolescents' school experiences (a parenting practice). Parental involvement in adolescents' schooling typically has beneficial effects when it involves authoritative parents. However, it is associated with negative outcomes when it is exhibited by authoritarian parents who are low in warmth and high in limit-setting (Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch, & Darling, 1992). In short, parenting style serves as a moderator of associations between parental involvement in schooling and adolescent academic competence. The same variable (in the previous example, parenting style) can both directly influence a given outcome variable and moderate associations between other predictor variables and said outcome (Baron & Kenny, 1986). In the case of moderation, a variable of interest is considered to set a context under which patterns of association among other variables may vary. Accordingly, moderator-focused research questions allow attention to be focused on the often overlooked (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1986) role of ecological context in child development. Research questions involving moderating effects are theoretically driven and require different data analytic strategies than do questions concerning more direct linkages between variables. Given research suggesting the importance of parental warmth as a stylistic dimension of parenting readily identified among parents and linked with a wide range of adaptive child outcomes (see Maccoby & Martin, 1983, for review), and empirical work suggesting its importance for the support of activity participation among gifted adolescents (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1993), we decided to focus in this article on its role as a parental predictor of activity involvement in a more heterogeneous adolescent population. We also decided to focus on parental encouragement, or reinforcement, of activity participation as a parenting practice that would logically appear to increase the likelihood that adolescents will become involved in schooland community-based extracurricular activities. Previous work with this same data set (Chan & Elder, 1999; Elder & Conger, in press) has demonstrated that parental involvement in community activities is predictive of adolescent civic participation. In keeping with theoretical and empirical emphases (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1986; Steinberg et al., 1992) on the importance of ecological context, we chose to examine the role of parental involvement in community activities as defining a context in which parenting styles and behaviors are expressed. Warm parents, who may or may not reinforce their children to participate in various activities, are exhibiting such behavior against a backdrop of their own civic participation or lack thereof. As noted, the civic involvement of parents depends on time—if parents work long hours, for example, they may not be able to put much time into the community. Reinforcement of youth opportunities and experiences may support the participational influence of parents, and it may underscore the importance of participation when parents are too busy to become involved in their communities. Accordingly, the functional meaning of parental reinforcement and warmth depends on the community roles of parents; parental community involvement potentially moderates effects of parental warmth and reinforcement on adolescent activity involvement. To understand the moderating role played by parental civic involvement, we can examine associations between adolescent activity involvement and other parental influences separately for groups of families defined by their levels of civic participation (Baron & Kenny, 1986). The warmth, reinforcement, and civic engagement of parents represent three different modes of intergenerational influence in the socialization of children's social involvement. This study investigates the role of these three distinct influences in determining the social involvement of youth. In theory, youth with warm parents are likely to be involved in community activities. A portion of this effect may be explained by the tendency of warm parents to reinforce their children in social endeavors. Both warmth and reinforcement should generate more of a difference in the social involvement of children when parents are relatively inactive. Data come from two waves of the Iowa Youth and Families Project.