The control perspective is common in research on adolescents. The idea is that young people, left to their natural tendencies, will engage in risky behavior. The key mechanism of social control is thought to be a sense of self-control that young people develop through socialization. Social control is typically conceptualized as attempts by parents to limit children’s opportunities to engage in risky activities. For example, parents’ monitoring of their adolescents’ activities (e.g., keeping tabs on where they go) is associated with reduced risky behavior (Barnes et al. 2000, Borawski et al. 2003). Yet parental monitoring and related discipline may backfire, leading to an escalation of risky health behaviors (Chuang et al. 2005, Ennett et al. 2001). Questions have also been raised about what conventional measures of parental monitoring capture. Basically, observed links between parents’ knowledge about their adolescents’ out-of-home behavior and adolescents’ lower rates of health risk behavior seem to be driven by better behaved youth wanting to have more involved relationships with parents rather than anything proactive on the part of parents (Stattin & Kerr 2000). This does not
