Over the years, several reasons have been presented as the contributing factors for juvenile delinquency in both adolescent and pre-adolescent kids. Many investigators have concluded that juvenile delinquency results from a combination of mental, social, and physical problems associated with adolescents' lives.

Regardless of the crime that a juvenile is accused of committing, the legal system believes that minors are entirely unaware of their actions. The legal system assumes that minors' ability to make decisions is not fully developed, and that's why they approach these cases differently. However, by addressing the underlying factors that contribute to child delinquency, you can develop a more secure environment and reduce the chances of child delinquency. 

Even so, you still have to seek a reliable legal representative to help you reduce the possibility of your child’s conviction. In this article, you learn the contributing factors to the delinquency of minors.

Factors that Lead to Delinquency in Children

Children engage in crime due to issues in their life. That's why the Juvenile Court System approaches criminal matters related to children differently than with adults. Mentioned below are some of the factors that cause juvenile delinquency:

Personality and Human Behavior

The personality and human behavior of a person are complicated phenomena, and It is challenging to say with certainty that these two factors are the significant contributors to children's delinquency. There's been a substantial hurdle to understanding why a child might engage in delinquent behaviors like stealing or gambling, unlike others born and raised in the same environment.

Regardless, numerous studies have shown that a mix of personal factors and environment contributes to juvenile delinquency. Therefore, personal characteristics are dependent on human genetics, heredity, and environment.

Physical Factors

A child's bodily condition can affect their behavior in one or more ways. It can directly cause delinquent behavior or form a handicap to the child's achievement of favorable relationships with other children or adults, as in the case of malnutrition and other defects. Delinquency might arise as an attempt of the child to compensate for these disabilities.

Thirdly, bodily conditions like specific developmental issues and physical exuberance can supply superficial energy that works as an outlet for the child's delinquency. Below is a detailed view of how different physical factors might contribute to delinquency.

Malnutrition

Malnutrition may result from:

  • Too little food due to poverty or carelessness.
  • Improperly selected food, which might lead to disproportionate essential elements of a balanced meal.
  • Excessive usage of stimulants like coffee, tea, which interferes with normal food assimilation.
  • Unpleasant surroundings during mealtimes.

Malnutrition can cause inertia and mental sluggishness, nervousness, or excitability in a child. All these conditions might lead to delinquency.

Lack of Sleep

A child might lack sleep due to the following:

  • Lack of hours, providing too little time for sleep.
  • Overcrowding in a bedroom, leading to sleep disturbance.
  • Bad dreams due to mental troubles or outside disturbances.

Lack of sleep can cause drowsiness and inertia. It also causes irritability, excitability, and nervousness. Therefore, a child may feel disabled, suffer from mental conflict, and engage in delinquency. A child may also exhibit destructive behaviors due to impulses that are easy to stimulate and hard to control due to fatigue and hyperexcitability.

Mental Factors

Mental factors can also contribute to delinquency in children in several ways. These ways include:

  • As a direct response or expression of a particular mental state.
  • An expression of certain emotions or impulses left uncontrolled or stimulated by a particular mental condition.
  • An attempt to adjust or compensate for certain mental peculiarities.

Mentioned below are different mental factors that can cause delinquency in children.

  1. Mental Defects

Mental defects can determine delinquency in any of the following ways:

  1. Through lack of appreciation of values. A child can commit crime and delinquency due to normal and abnormal impulses unchecked by caution and consideration for other people or their property.
  2. The inability to remember the consequences of their actions or those of others.
  3. Lack of resources for mental and physical energy expression through the lack of organized interest and mental imagery.
  4. The inability to meet the demands made by schools, individuals, or at home. The inferior child can engage in delinquent actions to compensate for their inferiority and assert themselves before others. This kind of children might also run away from their home and play truant to escape from the difficulties

  1. Superior Intelligence

Children with superior intelligence require little effort to meet their school demands. Therefore, they can end up using their surplus energies in delinquent actions.

Abnormalities of Emotions and Instinct

Everyone is born with certain instinctive tendencies to behave in a particular way or less definite in specific situations. Children with disabilities also tend to feel emotions under certain rough definable circumstances, like feeling afraid of the unknown or angry of interruptions.

These tendencies can vary in strength in different people, determining their forcefulness to respond to different situations.

Delinquency can result from emotional abnormalities due to irresistible impulse, where the individual conceives the goal of the dominant drive. This urges them to act in a particular way regardless of the ultimate consequences.

Intense emotions can also work in the same way. Some delinquent outbursts can be a form or direct expression of the dominant instinct but can also be as a form of behavior associated with individual instincts. For instance, a child can steal something due to strong sexual impulses. The association is usually established through the companionship with other delinquents who are thieves and are sexually immoral.

Please note, delinquency can also result from deficiencies in emotional tendencies and normal instinct. Lack of sympathy or fear is one of the most common examples of these deficiencies. Below is an example of human instincts and emotions that can cause specific types of delinquency, whether in excess or deficit.

Self-Assertion

Excess self-assertion can result in truancy, stealing, running away from home, violence, and other harmful behaviors to gain attention. Every child must boost their ego. Therefore, they must find it in one way or another, even if they engage in delinquent actions.

Acquisitive and Nutritive Instincts

Children with excess acquisitive nature may result in delinquent behaviors like pickpocketing, burglary, gambling, and forgery to acquire the desired goods.

Pugnacity/ Aggressive Nature

Children with excessive aggressive nature can engage in delinquent behaviors mentioned above. They also have tendencies to carry concealed weapons, engage in disorderly conduct, assault, and false accusations.

Fear

A child with excess fear can result in delinquent actions like carrying concealed weapons, lying, drug addiction, or attempting suicide.

Sexual Feelings

Children with excess sexual feelings can result to sexual offenses like perversion, assault, prostitution, excess lying, and assault. Deficiencies can also result in drugs, alcoholic intoxication, sex perversion, and prostitution.

Adventurous and Curiosity

Excessive curiosity can lead to vagrancy, truancy, stealing, gambling, and sexual crimes. They can also engage in all forms of theft, vagrancy, and running away from home. 

Obsessive Imagery and Imagination

Children whose mind is continually haunted by the vision of people doing things usually have psychosis. The disorder can be advanced or mild based on the frequency and intensity of the practical experiences. Some children can engage in peculiar conduct due to a command by a voice or imitation of a vision.

Vivid imagination in childhood can also tell fantasy stories and make false accusations. That's why adults brand these types of children as "terrible liars."

Inferiority Complex

Finally, a child can engage in delinquency due to an inferiority complex. The inferiority complex represents a feeling of being inferior due to several factors. In this case, a child engages in a delinquent act to protest against their inferiority.

When it comes to delinquent actions, a child can engage in behaviors like bullying due to tremendous antagonism to the cleverer children without knowing the reasons. Bullies usually use every opportunity to feel good about themselves by engaging in practical jokes like spoiling the more intelligent children's books or stealing their belongings.

Home Conditions

Home conditions can only cause delinquency in children indirectly. These conditions affect the children's mental and physical states, determining their behavior. These conditions can notably influence the child's mental life and sometimes cause delinquency, especially the child's physical condition. Mentioned below are some of the home conditions that can contribute to children's delinquency:

  1. Unsanitary Condition

Unsanitary home conditions significantly undermine a child's physical and mental health. They reduce the child's vitality and control of behavior. Noteworthy conditions include:

  • Unsanitary disposal of waste, filth, toilet arrangement.
  • Poor lighting, ventilation, and heating.
  • Overcrowding, especially in bedrooms. Children in overcrowded rooms can overhear conversations between fighting parents and witness violent scenes, distorting their views of life and suggesting engaging in delinquency.

Material Deficiencies

Material factors influence a child's physical well-being and significantly impact their mental well-being. Mentioned below are some of the material deficiencies together with the effects they have on children:

  • Lack of Proper Clothing: if a child has scanty clothing, it may cause the child to catch a cold or become weak. In this case, the child may try to compensate through delinquent actions. The child will consequently miss school and fall behind other children. They may also cause the child to be shy and retiring, developing delinquent habits out of their solitude.
  • Lack of Enough Pocket-Money: Though far-fetched, lack of enough pocket money can play a part in a child's delinquency. A child without enough pocket money feels inferior among his peers and may engage in delinquent actions like stealing to compensate for the deficiency.
  • Lack of Playing facilities, Toys, and Space: lack of playing opportunities denies a child need for exercise and discipline their emotional and intuitive desires. Engaging in play also provides the chance to develop social skills and offer suitable outlets to express and assert themselves. A deficiency in these opportunities can develop delinquency in a child as a form of compensation.
  • Lack of Personal Property: This denies children the opportunity to explore their acquisitive tendency and desire to possess things. As a result, the child can engage in stealing to acquire little treasures that they can call their own

Poverty and Unemployment

Poverty and unemployment contribute to ill-health, neglect, overcrowding, and ill-tempered parents. These two factors also influence a child’s urge for basic requirements like food, clothes, food, and some life's luxuries. That's why children raised in these conditions end up in theft and all kinds of delinquent behaviors that satisfy their primary urges.

Immoral and Delinquent Parents

Delinquent parents can influence their child through the suggestibility of a child and their tendency to imitate. However, this doesn't suggest that children raised by immoral parents will usually become delinquent. Even so, a child raised by immoral and delinquent parents will most likely resist the influence and power of their parents. As a result, they develop affection outside their family and become more open to outside influences and adopt delinquent actions.

Stigma from Illegitimacy

Illegitimacy can result in a bad attitude to children. Children raised to look upon this fact with shame can develop an inferiority complex and some abnormal behavior for some sort. Therefore, they can become delinquent when they develop a grudge against humanity and injure those that treated them with contempt.

School Conditions

School conditions can also be considered an indirect cause of delinquency, although it might be viewed as the primary cause. These school conditions affect the child's body and mind, leading to delinquent behavior. Some of the conditions that contribute to delinquency are:

  1. Inadequate School Equipment and Buildings

    Inadequate buildings and equipment are the primary cause of delinquency in children. This goes from poorly heated and lighted buildings, badly ventilated classrooms, or overcrowded classes. Lack of equipment also means that children aren't mainly occupied and this can be a dull way of life from their point of view. Therefore, some of the children experiencing these situations will end up with plenty of opportunities to plan and carry out delinquent acts.

  2. Inadequate Recreation Facilities

    Lack of recreation facilities like playground and gymnasium represent the lack of social outlet and training of their instincts. Therefore, a child might adopt delinquent habits to compensate for the lack of social outlet.

  3. Rigid and Inelastic School System 

    A school that employs a rigid system defeats its purpose of bringing upright and responsible citizens and producing young rebels. The following three factors might contribute to a child's delinquency:
  • Unnecessary Regulations: Unnecessary regulations can easily lead to resentment in children. A child might protest against these rules and become a delinquent.
  • Fixed Curricula: A fixed curriculum does not allow a child to adopt and might cause some dissatisfaction and play truant or get into trouble to avoid the dull and annoying tasks.
  • Lack of Individual Attention: Children require individual attention even in populated schools. The general teaching plan can be ill-suited to a child's individual needs. A child can be discouraged and disinterested if they don't have assistance for complicated tasks and turn to delinquency for satisfaction. On the other hand, if the school tasks are too easy, they may engage in some form of mischief to fill in their spare time.

Neighborhood Conditions

Neighborhood conditions can determine a child's behavior, like how a home and school condition would do. Some of the contributing factors in the neighborhood are as follows:

Lack of Recreational Facilities

Lack of recreational facilities in the neighborhood deprives a child of social outlets and means of discipline for normal and abnormal impulses. Most delinquent acts are committed during the spare time when a child spends time away from schoolwork or home chores. Therefore, children living in a neighborhood without playgrounds, game facilities, or sports clubs would most likely spend their spare time in mischief.

Congested Neighborhood

Congested neighborhoods may cause delinquency for the same reason as crowded schools and homes. The close contact of immoral and delinquent peers might fortify the mutual support needed to form gangs and engage in delinquent acts.

Proximity to Wealth and Luxury

Children from low-income families living near more wealthy families can develop an attitude of discontent or craving for their neighbor's luxuries. As a result, they may engage in various delinquent acts to satisfy their material cravings.

Loneliness and Lack of Social Outlets

A child born as the only child in a family may feel lonely and isolated if they are strictly confined and denied necessary play opportunities. Such a child is also deprived of socially acceptable means to express their rivalry, adventure, and self-display. As a result, they will be compelled to find some outlet for their social tendencies.

Overstimulating Movies and Shows

Many juvenile offenders are ardent movie lovers. It's thought that shows and movies can stimulate a child's primitive instincts for conquest, adventure, and acquisition and might suggest an active expression of their instinct through delinquent actions.

Find a Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney Near Me

Regardless of the underlying cause of your child's delinquency, you need the proper legal representation when your child is accused of committing a crime. At the Los Angeles Criminal Attorney, we are here to provide the best legal services for your child's delinquency charges. Our attorneys will carefully evaluate the allegations and provide the best legal services that guarantee the best outcomes. Contact us today at 424-333-0943, and let's get started.