Quality of parent-child relationships predicts well-being in adulthood, according to 21 countries

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

Previous studies suggest that the quality of relationships between parents and their children plays a role in the subjective well-being of these children as they reach adulthood. Although this finding is well documented, many previous studies have been conducted on relatively small samples of participants residing in a single country.

Jonathan T. Rothwell and Telli Davoodi, two researchers at Gallup, recently conducted a study to explore the link between parent-child relationships and an adult’s self-reported well-being in a larger, more diverse sample spanning 21 countries.

Their article, published in Communication psychologysuggests that the quality of parent-child relationships predicts the well-being of adults residing in all countries studied.

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

“It stuck with me for two decades as I pursued other work. In recent years, I continued to read about the increase in mental health problems among adolescents in the United States, but it seemed to me that no one was talking about the role of parents in general or how parenting may have changed over the past generations.

Rothwell recently decided to conduct a large survey-based study across the United States to explore the link between parenting practices, the quality of parent-child relationships, and youth mental health. This study, conducted in collaboration with co-author Davoodi, collected responses from young people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The researchers observed very strong connections between the three factors they examined, just as developmental and family psychologists have predicted for decades. Although their findings were very informative, this previous study only collected survey responses from youth in the United States.

“After this previous work, we learned about the Global Flourishing Study, an ambitious partnership between Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard University, Byron Johnson of Baylor University, the Open Science Foundation and Gallup,” Rothwell said.

“The research team wanted to collect deeper, more culturally inclusive data on human well-being and flourishing, and included several interesting retrospective pieces about childhood experiences. Telli and I immediately pre-recorded a research design to measure the association between childhood experiences of parenting and adult flourishing and to see what country characteristics, if any, moderated the effects.

In their new study, Rothwell and Davoodi analyzed an even larger data set, including 200,000 interviews and surveys collected by telephone, in person or online. Participants surveyed or interviewed were adults and resided in a total of 21 countries around the world.

The countries included in this study were carefully selected to maximize the religious and ethnic diversity of the sample. The goal was to include people living in all of the larger geographic regions of the Earth.

“Adults were asked if they felt loved by their mother or father growing up,” Rothwell explained.

“They were asked whether, in general, the relationship with each parent was very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad, and they were asked whether they felt like outsiders in their family. These items were used to construct an index of the quality of the parent-child relationship”

To gauge how well study participants were thriving in their adult lives, 19 of the questions they were asked specifically asked about their level of hope, satisfaction with their health and virtue . For example, participants were asked to what extent they agreed with statements such as: “Despite challenges, I still remain hopeful about the future” and “If I had to list everything I am for grateful, that would be a long list. “.

“We also measured mental health using seven items, most of which measure clinical symptoms like sadness and anxiety,” Rothwell said. “Importantly, the survey included measures of childhood socioeconomic status, parental religiosity, and numerous items measuring the current respondent’s religious beliefs, economic situation, and family background.”

Rothwell and Davoodi analyzed participants’ responses together, aiming to answer two different research questions. The first was: To what extent do childhood parental experiences predict adult well-being? The second was: What predicts better childhood parenting experiences?

“We found a substantial effect of parent-child relationships on thriving and mental health,” Rothwell said. “The effect was larger than any other variable we tested, including parental socioeconomic status, current education level, current household income, gender, and financial security.

“The relationship was positive in all countries, and it reached conventional levels of significance in all but one. Even this exception seemed to be explained by the relatively young population in the survey. When we reweighted the data so that the ages were similar across countries, we found a significant effect in each country.

Overall, the results of this study suggest that there is a universal link between parent-child relationships and well-being across the lifespan, which applies to everyone, regardless of location. they grew up.

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

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

“Perhaps partly because of this, higher-income, secular countries score lower on our prosperity index than lower-income, more religious countries. For me, this implies a formidable cultural challenge: as As the world grows and becomes more secular, we must be careful not to abandon traditional wisdom about raising children.

Rothwell and Davoodi’s recent work suggests that one’s experience with their parents influences their well-being and mental health as adults. In the future, this key finding could pave the way for larger-scale global studies designed to further explore this widespread effect.

“In early 2025, my colleagues and I at Gallup are conducting a new American Parenting Survey to further improve the measurement of parenting practices that lead to the highest quality relationships and the best long-term child outcomes. mental health,” Rothwell added.

“I also want to understand how parenting affects the development of character traits and virtues, and better distinguish the contributions of genetics from those of parenting practices. In addition to generating more academic publications, I plan to write all of this up and much more in a book that I hope to finish next year.

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