To many teens, nothing sounds worse than hanging out with their parents.
But what if family bonds during adolescence meant a better social life down the line?
A study published this week in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that a close, nurturing relationship with parents during middle and high school was associated with a variety of positive social metrics up to two decades later.
Researchers looked at six outcomes, such as having three or more close friends or socializing at least once a week. They found that high social connection in adulthood was more than twice as common among those who had felt the strongest family ties in youth, compared with those who had felt the weakest.
“We tend to think of adult loneliness or low social connectedness as byproducts of individual choice or adult social structures,” said Dr. Andrew Garner, a pediatrician and researcher at Case Western Reserve University, who was not involved in the research. This study, on the other hand, “forces us to think developmentally.”
Researchers have long known that a strong parent-child relationship correlates with well-being in adulthood, but most studies have focused on internal measures like self-acceptance or a sense of purpose, rather than external dimensions such as satisfaction with relationships.
But in an era of social media and reduced in-person connection — so severe that the surgeon general in 2023 declared a “loneliness epidemic” — epidemiologists are paying closer attention to the role of isolation in health outcomes, whether anxiety, cardiovascular disease or early mortality. Some medical providers have also shifted accordingly.
Dr. Robert C. Whitaker, an author of the new study and a professor of clinical pediatrics at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, has sought to invert the traditional approach by helping families understand what they can be doing, rather than what they should avoid.
“We don’t really set up studies to ask those kinds of questions,” he said. “We’re always trying to look for and mitigate risk, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to a full understanding of why people flourish.”
Historically, social development research has also relied on participants recalling their childhoods, a method prone to the fallibility of memory. Instead, Dr. Whitaker and his colleagues used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which followed a nationally representative cohort of teens from as early as seventh grade into their 30s and 40s.
Naturalistic studies that track subjects in real time are rare.
“Two decades of information gives us a greater sense of the truth,” said Dr. David Willis, a professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the study. “Two decades of information is compelling. It’s a big deal.”
In their early years, the participants rated how much their family members understood them, how much fun they had together, and whether they felt cared for and wanted, among other metrics. Dr. Whitaker and his colleagues averaged each of the 7,018 participants’ various answers into individual “family connection scores,” then grouped the participants into quartiles.
When the adolescents became adults, they were asked about the structure, function and quality of various social connections.
After controlling for confounding variables such as race, gender, and parental education levels, Dr. Whitaker’s team found that adolescents in the highest quartile of family connection scores had a prevalence of high social connection in adulthood that was 23.4 percentage points greater than that of those in the lowest quartile.
Only 16.1 percent of adolescents in the lowest quartile of family connection ended up with high social connection in adulthood; 22 percent of those in the second-lowest quartile; 28.6 percent of those in the third-lowest quartile; and 39.5 percent of those in the highest quartile. The magnitude of the association was consistent across all six metrics used to measure adult social well-being.
“A lot happens between 16 and 37,” Dr. Whitaker said. “Life is complicated. There’s a lot of intervening variables. So to have something that still shows up as a meaningful association over 20 years is powerful.”
While the research did not examine the mechanisms at play, experts believe that parents who set a healthy relational tone were modeling skills and habits that their children could adopt and apply later on.
The authors wrote that pediatricians could help by supporting parents who did not grow up with such relationships. By helping parents feel safe and seen even during uncertain times, they concluded, the parents could in turn offer that stability to their children.
“This validates what pediatricians try to do every day,” Dr. Garner said. “Sure, we want children to get their immunizations, and we love to help parents with concrete milestones like healthy eating, toilet training and sleeping well.
“But we also want to ensure that every child is seen, understood and valued,” he added, for the sake of their long-term health.
The hope is that there will be meaningful payoff for generations, Dr. Willis said.
“Two decades later,” he said, “many of those adolescents are now parents themselves.”
Emily Baumgaertner Nunn is a national health reporter for The Times, focusing on public health issues that primarily affect vulnerable communities.
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