Early Adverse Childhood Experiences and Later Delinquency: Considering the Role of Middle Childhood Risk Factors

ABSTRACT

Evidence suggests that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with adolescent and adult delinquency. Simultaneously, studies have identified an association between middle childhood risk factors and subsequent delinquency. However, the research on how the relationship between early ACEs and adolescent delinquency is affected by middle childhood risk factors for delinquency is sparse. The current study addresses this, and other important gaps in existing ACE literature by using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS; n = 3,444), a national urban birth cohort, to analyze how different levels of exposure to early ACEs (by age five) are associated with delinquency and to explore how multiple middle childhood risk factors (low self-control, prior delinquency, material hardship, experiences with bullying, and more recent ACE exposure) might mediate these processes. Findings suggest that two or more ACEs is significantly associated with increased rates of adolescent delinquency and that the association grows stronger as ACEs accumulate. Further, later ACEs, low self-control and prior delinquency mediate some of this relationship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2023.2268254

Notes

¹ The measures of the 15 youth delinquent acts in the original four-point scale are not true “counts” because the measurement scheme used in the questionnaire is truncated. Thus, a value of 1 on the delinquency scale might indicate a respondent has been involved in a specific activity “one to two times a year,” a value of 2 represents “three to four times” and value of 3 represents “five or more times” Because we are unable to determine true “counts” for these 15 types of youth delinquent acts, we have chosen to take a more conservative approach to exploring the relationship between ACEs and youth delinquency by collapsing these categories into a participation model where 0 indicates “no participation in any delinquent act” and 15 signifies “participation in all acts in the past 12 months.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Braden Reese

Braden Reese is currently a second-year law student at Brigham Young University, following his undergraduate degree in Sociology. His research and law interests focus on criminal behavior and criminal law.

Hayley Pierce

Hayley Pierce is an assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University and received a PhD in Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. Broadly, her research specialties include the wellbeing of women and children. More specifically, she studies the unequal distribution of childhood adversity and adolescent outcomes and women’s reproductive health.

Melissa S. Jones

Melissa S. Jones is an assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Oklahoma. Her research efforts are centered in understanding how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and other forms of trauma shape health and behavior outcomes across the life course and how these processes may vary across groups.