Effects of Parental Support and Friendship Support on Loneliness and Depression During Early and Middle Adolescence

Abstract

Teenagers’ relationships with parents and friends undergo many changes during their adolescence. Friendship becomes increasingly important. However, researchers have found that support and warmth from parents still play an important role in fostering healthy socioemotional development for adolescents. Although lots of studies have explored the main effect of parental and friendship support on adolescent adjustments, few have examined the interaction between the two. It should be noted that at least three relationship patterns have been discovered according to existing research: an enhancement pattern, a compensation pattern and an independence pattern. But no consistent conclusion about these interaction patterns has been achieved, which is probably due to different emotional problems, ages and genders in different studies. So this study adopted the Chinese modified versions of the Network of Relationships Inventory, Friendship Quality Questionnaire, Loneliness Scale, and Children’s Depression Inventory, and specially focused on the interaction patterns between parental support and friendship support on adolescent loneliness and depression and their applicability to different stages and genders with a sample of 391 Chinese adolescents (211 boys and 180 girls) from grade 7 (early adolescence) and 10 (middle adolescence). The main findings were as follows. (1) On one hand, middle adolescents perceived significantly lower parental support and friendship quality than early adolescents did, but no significant difference was found in loneliness and depression. On the other hand, girls perceived obviously higher friendship support than boys did, and no other significant difference was observed between genders. (2) Friendship support was the better predictor for adolescent loneliness, whereasparental support was the better predictor for adolescent depression. (3) During early adolescence, parental support and friendship support had significant interactions in loneliness and depression while the specific interacting patterns were different. High level of parental support enhanced the positive effect of high friendship support on reducing loneliness (an enhancement pattern), whereas high friendship support compensated the negative effect of low level of parental support (a compensation pattern); High parental support and high friendship support enhanced each other in the positive effect on reducing depression (an enhancement- each-other pattern). (4) Contrasted to early adolescents, there was no significant interaction between parental support and friendship support on middle adolescent depression (an independence pattern). These interacting patterns of boys were similar to those of girls. It suggests that the effects of family and peers on adolescent emotional adjustments take several types of patterns, which can be applied to different adjustment problems and development stages.