The impact of exposure to violence on a trajectory of (declining) parental monitoring: A partial test of the ecological-transactional model of community violence

Five waves of longitudinal data collected from 348 African American youth living in extreme poverty are used to examine the impact of exposure to violence on parenting over time. Semiparametric group-based modeling is used to identify trajectories of parental monitoring and exposure to violence from Time 1 (T1) to Time 5 (T5). Results indicate that for youth (a) 48% had a trajectory of declining parental monitoring and (b) 7% had sharply increasing exposure to violence from T1 to T5. Multivariate findings are consistent with the ecological-transactional model of community violence. Exposure to violence T1 was a precursor of a trajectory of declining parental monitoring T1 to T5. Youth with a trajectory of stable and sharply increasing exposure to violence were more than 200% more likely to have declining parental monitoring T1 to T5. The theoretical implications of these findings as well as areas for future research are also discussed.