14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone knows that, for a small child, the family has the most pregnant influence. The development of infants is most significantly influenced by their parents, so it would stand to reason then that family-based intervention is the way to go, if the adults want to prevent their offspring from engaging in risky behavior when they are in their early teens, or even later on in life. In a new scientific study, experts have demonstrated that this course of action prevented a number of rural African American teens from engaging in dangerous behavior during this delicate age.
“This study demonstrates that parents play an important role in protecting their children from initiating harmful behaviors, especially when the children's biological makeup may pose a challenge,” University of Georgia Center for Family Research Director Gene H. Brody explains. He is also the lead author of a new longitudinal study detailing the finds, published in the May/June issue of the scientific journal Child Development. Experts from the University of Georgia, the University of Iowa, and the Vanderbilt University have also participated in the investigation.
The study spanned a two-and-a-half-year period, and included approximately 650 African American 11-year-olds, as well as their parents. The goal of the “Strong African American Families” was to prevent the children from engaging in such risky behavior as using drugs, drinking alcohol, smoking, or starting relationships at a very early age. The results that this group obtained were compared with those that the experts gathered from a similar group, which was not part of the program, but only received information about adolescent behavior.
“Much of the protective influence of participation in the prevention program came through the program's enhancement of parenting practices that deter teens' involvement in risky behaviors. The power of such parenting practices to override genetic predispositions to drug use and other risky behaviors demonstrates the capacity of family-centered prevention programs to benefit developing adolescents,” Brody says.
The parents in the research group were carefully taught by the experts how to remain vigilant of their child's behavior, and also how to support them emotionally, communicate with them, and make them proud of their race. As far as the children themselves were concerned, the scientists told them how to aim for positive goals, shared with them a few strategies to attain those goals, and also explained to them how to avoid getting caught in behavior that might hinder their success in achieving their goals.
Some two years after the study started, children from both groups were asked to come into the team's laboratory and give saliva samples. The team looked for expression of a certain gene, which determined a person's predisposition to engaging in risky behavior. Of the children from both groups who had the gene, those in the one outside the study showed they were twice as likely to have engaged in risky behavior, as opposed to those in the group that was guided by the experts.