Teaching Teens About Relationships

• Post by: TNF Editor
• January 9, 2014

Much research has centered on the factors that contribute to adolescents’ later abilities to forge their own healthy intimate relationships.  A good parental marriage has already been identified as one crucial factor, as adolescents imitate positive relationship views and behaviors that they learn from watching their parents interact.  Also crucial, researchers from the University of Alberta have discovered, is the quality of the parents’ relationship with the adolescent. The researchers highlight two purposes in their study: 1) to uncover the association between parent-adolescent relationship quality and later, young-adult intimate relationship quality, and 2) to examine the possible but more indirect association between adolescent-parent relationship and mental health during adolescents’ transition to adulthood.   Data came from the Add Health study, which collected, among other things, “information related to social, economic, psychological, intimate relationship, and health domains.”  The researchers measured survey responses to questions concerning parent-adolescent relationship quality, parent-young adult relationship quality, depressive symptoms, self-esteem, and intimate relationship quality, while controlling for sex, age, race, education, religiousness, relationship length, and relationship type. The results were “striking”: “ . . . parent-adolescent relationship quality directly predicted quality in an intimate relationship 15 years later.”  Moreover, the researchers comment that “[t]his is even more impressive when one considers that this finding persisted after accounting for the influence of concurrent parent-young adult relationship quality, mental health during adolescence and the transition to adulthood, sex, age, race, and level of education.”  The researchers also discovered that good mental health (as shown in answers to questions about self-esteem and depressive symptoms) also worked