Why Children Follow Rules

[A] powerful book that has clear connections to both scholarship and the wider social order...the content of the book also makes a broader argument for a reorientation of legal authority and proactive engagement with members of society to see the development of healthy and positive individuals, and move toward a resilient and sustainable legal authority. Scholarship of this cast can help to alter a course that runs contrary to what societies strive to correct in adult life." -Criminal Justice and Behavior
If we want to understand why adults follow rules and obey the law, it is crucial to study how children and adolescents develop their understanding of law and law-related values, attitudes and behaviors. Why Children Follow Rules gives us a deeper understanding of that process and why it is so important to study." -Journal of Youth and Adolescence
Tyler and Trinkner provide a well-researched book highlighting the importance of understanding legal socialization as an integral part of a young person's overall socialization process and showing how these processes affect behavior in adulthood." -Contemporary Sociology
...an easy read and a fascinating introduction to the topic of socialization in the law." -CHOICE
This is a fine book with many important messages. It commends the positive and proactive approach of creating a value climate within which people view authorities as legitimate. When parents, schools and police respond in punitive, arbitrary and humiliating ways to wrongdoing by young people, they tend to make things worse. When they respond in respectful, fair and restorative ways to salvage opportunities to learn from wrongdoing, they tend to make things better. It is not rocket science. Yet this book is the best of science in how to build the decent society bottom-up through simple gifts to our next generation of children." -John Braithwaite, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University
Why Children Follow Rules is an important book on legal socialization. It expands the area from cognitive developmental psychology to include a focus on the centrality of authorities including parents, teachers, and the juvenile justice system among children and adolescents. Tom Tyler and Rick Trinkner do a great job of integrating two distinctive legal socialization approaches: the cognitive developmental approach of legal reasoning, legal attitudes, and rule following/rule-breaking and the authority approach of procedural justice, legitimacy of authority, legal cynicism, and rule-following/rule-breaking. This book is a must read for legal socialization researchers and practitioners." -Ellen S. Cohn, Professor of Psychology and Justice Studies, University of New Hampshire
A worthy sequel to Why People Obey the Law, Why Children Follow Rules makes a strong, research-based case for adopting the same procedural justice approach toward young people that Tyler has long advocated for adults. The book has one clear, timely message: Subject youth to disrespectful confrontation, rigid enforcement, and unexplained punishment, and both their reoffending and their contempt for rules is likely to increase." -Christopher Slobogin, Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University