Quality of Parent-Child Relationships Predicts Adulthood Well-Being

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

The link between early life experiences and mental health has been widely explored by psychology researchers. One key aspect of human early life experiences is the relationship that people develop with their parental figures, which is at the center of attachment theory and various other psychological models.

Past studies suggest that the quality of relationships between parents and their children plays a role in the subjective well-being of these children when they reach adulthood. While this finding is well-documented, many past studies were conducted on relatively small samples of participants residing in a single country.

Jonathan T. Rothwell and Telli Davoodi, two researchers at Gallup, recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the link between parent-child relationships and an adult’s self-reported well-being in a larger and more varied sample that spanned across 21 countries.

Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that the quality of parent-child relationships predicts the well-being of adults residing in all of the countries they studied.

“I worked in psychiatric treatment facilities and clinics during college and saw many examples of the profound effect that family conflict has on the mental health of adolescents and adults,” Rothwell told Medical Xpress.

In their new study, Rothwell and Davoodi analyzed an even larger pool of data, including 200,000 interviews and surveys gathered over the phone, in-person or online. The participants who were surveyed or interviewed were adults and resided in a total of 21 countries worldwide.

The countries included in this study were selected carefully, to maximize religious and ethnic diversity in the sample. The objective was to include people living in all the broader geographical regions on Earth.

Overall, the findings of this research study suggest that there is a universal link between parent-child relationships and lifelong well-being, which applies to all people, irrespective of where they were raised.

However, the impact of parent-child relationships on well-being appeared to be more pronounced in secular and higher-income countries, perhaps because most people living in these countries do not have to worry about their basic needs being met (i.e., food, shelter, security, etc.). In other words, the well-being of individuals in developing or low-income countries could also be adversely affected by other factors, including poverty, war and starvation.

“Our main secondary finding is that more religious parents tend to have better relationships with their children in every country in our sample,” said Rothwell.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-quality-parent-child-relationships-adulthood.html