News

Most Runaway Teens Return Home With Help of Family Ties

The teen years can be a tumultuous time, as many parents know, a time when adolescents begin to flex their mental muscles, testing boundaries and turning to peers rather than parents for advice. Sometimes emotions and arguments can become so intense that things get out of hand and the child runs away.

While past research on runaway teens has tended to focus on the antisocial and high-risk behaviors of taking to the streets and the causes leading to kids running away—including family violence and abus a new UCLA study has found that common stereotypes of homeless youth are largely inaccurate.

Reporting in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Norweeta G. Milburn, PhD, a research psychologist in the psychiatry department at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and colleagues found that most homeless young people actually return home soon after they leave and, in terms of development as adolescents, are possibly less chronically troubled than their reputation may indicate.

The keys seem to be maintaining relationships with prosocial or mainstream peers (non-runaways), staying in school and the support of parents, especially a teen's mother. All of these factors influence teens to return home.

"Our finding goes against the grain of what most people envision a homeless teenager's life to be—a life filled with maltreatment, substance abuse, disorganization, conflict, and violence," Milburn says. "While that is certainly true of chronic runaways, in fact, more than two thirds of newly homeless youth leave the streets, resolve their family differences and go home. Further, the key appears to be that a family intervention, no matter how brief, can improve the chances that new runaways will go home and stay home."

Most research has focused on the one third of adolescents who chronically run away. A frequent cause of that, Milburn says, is indeed family abuse.

"Parents of adolescents who become long-term homeless often have a history of substance use and physical abuse that lessens their ability to parent effectively and increases the propensity for conflict," she says.

The family, however, can play a positive role in the lives of homeless adolescents, Milburn notes, especially newly homeless adolescents. "For these teens, relationships with their family may be problematic, but being on the streets may be worse," she says.

For the study, the researchers followed 183 newly homeless adolescents over a two-year period in Los Angeles and found that staying engaged with their prosocial peers and staying in school influenced the runaway teens to return home. Particularly key was support from their mothers.

"The importance of a supportive mother is striking and appears to be especially influential for the teen," Milburn says. "A majority of the newly homeless adolescents in this sample reported having a mother from whom they could receive emotional support."

— Source: UCLA Health Sciences