Aggressiveness in Colombian juvenile delinquents and its relationship with parental aggressiveness

Parental hostility can generate in children the formation of thinking and action styles that put them at risk of developing socially maladaptive behaviors. An ex post facto quantitative de-scriptive-correlational study was carried out to analyze aggressive behaviors in Colombian ju-venile delinquents and their relationships with the same behaviors in their fathers and moth-ers. A total of 115 male juveniles (with their mothers and fathers) who were in pretrial de-tention for different offenses participated. Five self-reports were applied to measure differ-ent forms of aggressiveness in the youths, their mothers and fathers. Except for hostility, the youths had higher scores than their mothers and/or fathers in all other forms of aggression. Regarding appetitive aggression, youths and their fathers had higher scores than their moth-ers. Multiple correlations were found between the different forms of aggression of youths, mothers and fathers.