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Children continue to be born and raised in our societies every day. However, raising them to become responsible citizens that the society needs, has increasingly become a challenge to parents. Some parents, for several reasons are unable to raise their children properly, thereby plunging the children into problem behaviour. Thus, a focal point for educators has been to investigate issues surrounding parenting which is the backbone of child upbringing. This study focuses on differences in the parenting behaviours of fathers and mothers as a possible predictor of externalizing problem behaviour in adolescents. It particularly dwells on whether differences exist between a father and a mother in their parenting behaviours towards a target child in their family and whether these differences can predict externalizing problem behaviour in adolescents cross-sectionally and longitudinally. To achieve this, data from an existing database, the STRATEGIES (Studying Transactions in Adolescence: Testing Genes in Interaction with Environments) project was used for the analyses. The study investigated how fathers and mothers differed in five different parenting behaviours including; parenting support, proactive control, punitive control, harsh punitive control and psychological control. It examined whether fathers and mothers had differences in these parenting behaviours towards a target child in the family. The study also sought to know whether these differences in parenting behaviour can predict externalizing problem behaviour (rule-breaking and aggressive behaviour) in adolescents, cross sectionally and longitudinally. Paired sample t-tests were conducted to find out if there were differences in the parenting behaviours of fathers and mothers towards a target child while regression analyses were carried out to establish whether these parenting differences can predict externalizing problem behaviour in adolescents. The findings partly confirm both the second and third hypotheses because the difference(s) variables account for variance in rule-breaking behaviour, cross-sectionally and longitudinally. It also accounts for the variance in aggressive behaviour, cross-sectionally but not longitudinally. Based on these findings, recommendations are made to parents, therapists, schools and even psychiatrics, to work towards more unified parenting behaviours because this has been found out to be a major predictor of externalizing behaviour in adolescents.