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Study Suggests Why Parents Are Stricter With Older Children |
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From Ascribe Newsfeed: If you think your parents let your younger siblings get away with everything, you're probably right. A new study from researchers at Duke University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland concludes that parents punish older children more harshly -- and they're wise to do so. The study, "Games Parents and Adolescents Play," finds evidence that parents are more likely to withdraw financial support from older siblings who either drop out of high school -- or in the case of girls, get pregnant -- than their younger brothers and sisters who wind up in the same situations. The study, published in the April 2008 issue of the Economic Journal, is co-authored by V. Joseph Hotz, an economics professor at Duke; Lingxin Hao, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins; and Ginger Z. Jin, an assistant economics professor at Maryland. "My older sister always complains that she never got away with anything when she was growing up, and we all agree that my youngest sister got away with murder," said Hotz, who was the middle child of five siblings and is now the parent of two grown children. The model assumes that parents want their adolescent children to avoid long-term negative consequences that can result from risk-taking behaviors, such as drinking, drug use, sexual activity and dropping out of school. The authors posit in the model that parents need a reputation among their children for following through on threatened punishments.
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