Parenting practices and adolescents' friendship networks

Using data on 11,044 adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the relationship between parenting practices and the composition of an adolescent's friendship network. In general, parent-child relationship quality, selecting a neighborhood because of its schools, and parents' supervision are negatively associated with having a more delinquent friendship network but positively associated with having a more prosocial network. These results suggest that parents have the capacity to shape the characteristics of their child's friendship networks, even after taking into account the likelihood that adolescents have friends who are similar to themselves.