Current family-delinquency research suggests that the relationships between parenting and delinquency should be viewed from interactional and developmental perspectives. The relationship between parent and child is thought to change over time, partly as a function of reciprocal causal influences between them. In this study, using panel data from a representative sample of 838 urban adolescents, the authors test the hypothesis that parenting and delinquency are reciprocally related. They also hypothesize that two central parenting dimensions, affective ties and supervision, are bidirectionally related. It is found that delinquency and parental supervision are reciprocally related, whereas affective ties appear to be a consequence rather than a cause of delinquency, at least by middle adolescence. In general, the interrelationships among these variables are more complex than those suggested by earlier unidirectional theories, and they underline the importance of interactional perspectives in understanding the interrelationship of adolescent behavior and parenting.
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