"He doesn't need anything. I give that boy everything he wants. He's got two parents who are together. It just doesn't make sense,” lamented the mother of an adolescent recently arrested for a string of robberies in the US city of Milwaukee. The only explanation she can provide is that "he just fell in with the wrong crowd." [See: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Eugene Kane column: “Mothers try, then cry, when kids do wrong”]

Similarly in Waltham Forest in East London a 19-year-old told BBC journalists last year how easy it was to get caught up in the gang culture: "In your mind you feel like you want to be positive [and] get out of it, but when you grow up on an estate every day and you're with the same people who are influencing you in the same way, it blocks your mind." [See: The Gangs of Waltham Forest]

So it’s a common explanation, and there’s research to support the argument that children can lead their peers down the wrong path. But some people are more impressionable than others; indeed research also shows that some kids hang out in the wrong crowd but manage to stay on the straight-and-narrow.

What is it that inoculates some youth from the influences of their “bad” friends? A recent study by Theodore W. Gardner, Thomas J. Dishion and Arin M. Connell at the University of Oregon suggests the answer is self-regulation.

In other words, the key is the ability among young people to set goals, stay on task, and inhibit feelings or avoid pressures that might steer them off track.

Gardner and his colleagues came to this conclusion after tracking a group of 802 ethnically diverse adolescents between the ages of 17 and 19. At the beginning and end of the two-year period, the teens themselves and their parents and teachers responded to questions about the teens’ ability to self-regulate, the behavior of their friends, and their own behavior.

They found that study participants who were able self-regulators generally did a better job of resisting their friends’ influences than did participants who were impulsive.

The researchers conclude that efforts to help poorly-behaved children should include a focus on boosting children’s self-regulation skills. They also warn that kids who struggle to regulate themselves are probably best treated individually rather than in group settings where they will encounter – and may succumb to – the negative influences of other group members.

• Summary of “Adolescent Self-Regulation as Resilience: Resistance to Antisocial Behavior within the Deviant Peer Context” by Theodore W. Gardner, Thomas J. Dishion and Arin M. Connell in Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Volume 36, Number 2, February, 2008, pp135-298.

[For more PA articles on the work of Tom Dishion, see: When togetherness can do more harm than good, Sometimes it can be better to be in with the out-crowd and Putting brain science back on the streets of Los Angeles.