The Riskiest of Them All: Examining Adolescent Behaviors on Parental Time Inputs

Individuals with higher parental supervision are less likely to engage in teenage risky behaviors. Using a quantitative measurement of parental supervision instead of proxies, I confirm this negative relationship with a PSID-CDS sample of teenagers from 10 to 18
years old. Using lagged measurements of time supervision (observed at 5 to 12 years old), OLS results show a negative relationship with maternal time for risky behaviors engaged recently (i.e. smoked cigarettes in the past month, drank alcohol at least once a week in the past year). With a household fixed effects estimation that removes unobserved family-specific heterogeneity, the paternal role emerges among health risky behaviors measured over the long span (e.g. ever smoked a cigarette). A separate estimation that allows for non-linear effects of parental time shows that the negative influence of parents are present among those who have received the most amount of time supervision during the pre-adolescent period.