The Role of Parental Status and Child Age in the Engagement of Children and Youth with Adults Outside their Families

Abstract

The authors report on a telephone poll with a nationally representative sample of 1,425 U.S. adults in which they investigated how parental status and age of child might affect patterns of adult engagement with children and youth outside their own families. Compared to nonparents, parents considered 12 of 20 ways of being involved with young people to be significantly more important for all adults to do. This result suggests that fears of negative parent reaction about other adults’ involvement may be exaggerated. Parents and nonparents alike rated it more important for unrelated adults to engage with children than with adolescents, and adults, in general, actually engaged more with those younger children than with adolescents. Community efforts that raise explicit awareness of how supportive parents are of such relationships may help create new social norms in which positive engagement with other people’s children and especially adolescents is expected and supported.