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17/02/2022

11/01/2022

Teens who feel down may benefit from picking others up
Think about the last time you helped someone out. Maybe you sent a supportive text to a stressed-out friend or gave directions to a lost stranger.

How did it make you feel?

If you said good, happy, or maybe even “warm and fuzzy,” you’re not alone. Research shows that helping others offers a number of important psychological and health benefits.

In daily life, people report better mood on days that they assist a stranger or offer an empathetic ear to a friend. Adults who volunteer, spend money on others and support their spouses also experience improved well-being and reduced risk of death.

Helping others is beneficial in part because it promotes social closeness and feelings of personal competence.

As a researcher who studies adolescent development, I decided to investigate how all this might play out in teenagers. I’m interested in studying teens’ prosocial behavior – things like helping, comforting and sharing – in the context of their close relationships. Given that adolescence is a time of heightened emotional intensity, do teens reap mood benefits from helping out others in everyday life?

Teens and depression
Looking back on your own high school years, you might recall feeling intensely anxious about looking cool in front of classmates or being liked by your crush. During adolescence, youth become increasingly preoccupied with the opinions of their peers, including their friends and romantic partners. Indeed, adolescence is a time when experiences of social exclusion or rejection can sting particularly badly.

The teenage years can be a hard time for some adolescents. Paul De Los Reyes, CC BY
The teenage years are also a high-risk time for developing depressive symptoms. Almost 1 in every 11 adolescents and young adults in the U.S. experience a major depressive episode. And, even youth with depressive symptoms who don’t meet criteria for an official diagnosis of depression are at risk for adjustment problems, such as loneliness and romantic relationship difficulties.

Depressed adolescents, in addition to feeling hopeless and lacking self-esteem, often respond to social stress with intensified negative emotions. For example, adolescents with major depressive disorder take peer rejection harder than do their healthy peers.

If depressed adolescents feel especially bad after negative social encounters, might they feel especially good after positive social encounters? Psychologists know that in general adolescents’ concerns about social approval can make positive interpersonal interactions – like offering a peer support or assistance – all the more rewarding. I wanted to see if that held even for teens who were feeling down.

Did you help someone today?
In our 2018 study, my colleagues and I examined teenagers’ prosocial behavior in their everyday interactions with friends and romantic partners. Our goal was to understand whether giving help is particularly mood-enhancing for youth with depressive symptoms.

We recruited 99 late adolescents from the community around us in Los Angeles. Most of them were high school students or recent high school graduates. First we assessed their depressive symptoms in the lab so we could find out how they’d been feeling the prior couple weeks.

Then we asked them to complete 10 consecutive days of short surveys at home. Each of the 10 days, participants told us whether they helped out their friends or romantic partners – things like doing them a favor, or making them feel important. They also reported their own mood.

On days that teens helped their friends or dating partners, they experienced increased positive mood. Even if their mood wasn’t great the day before or if they themselves didn’t receive any social support that day, helping someone else was still related to a boost in their spirits.

But does helping help some teens more than others? The positive effects of day-to-day prosocial behavior on mood that we saw were strongest for teens with higher levels of depressive symptoms. So youth with elevated emotional distress reaped the greatest mood benefits from lending their peers a helping hand.

While we often talk about the importance of receiving social support when we’re feeling down, these findings highlight the unique value of providing support to others.

Teens felt better when they supported a friend. Justin Groep/Unsplash, CC BY
Helping others helps yourself
This study provides a glimpse into the potential benefits of help-giving for teens, particularly those experiencing depressive symptoms. Our finding builds upon previous research demonstrating that prosocial behavior is most rewarding for people experiencing social anxiety, neuroticism and body dissatisfaction.

Although we did not test for underlying mechanisms for why this might be, it’s possible that providing help can make individuals feel appreciated by others or promote their sense of purpose and self-esteem. For youth with high levels of social-emotional distress, opportunities to strengthen social connections and feel competent within close relationships might be especially important for improving mood.

Many studies linking prosocial behavior to mood, ours included, are correlational — we cannot conclude that helping friends or romantic others causes more positive mood. Experimental studies that randomly assign some participants to engage in acts of kindness and others to engage in non-helping social activities will help rule out the possibility that it’s actually positive mood that drives subsequent prosocial behavior.

It’s also important to keep in mind that very few of our participants were clinically depressed. Research still needs to determine whether prosocial behavior is similarly linked to positive mood among adolescents with a diagnosed depressive disorder. An interesting question is whether some depressed youth experience emotional “burnout” from very frequent help-giving.

Although the word “adolescence” may conjure up images of reckless teens experiencing interpersonal conflict and emotional turmoil, the adolescent years are a time of great social opportunity and growth. Understanding when, how and why teens behave prosocially – and for whom help-giving most promotes well-being – can contribute to our understanding of adolescent social development.

11/01/2022

Young people value diversity, humour and honesty in their friendships – new research
Friendships made in school play a special part in young people’s development. They are more than just moral support, friends help them learn key social skills, and serve as a source of social support. Close school friends also help young people develop a sense of importance, trust, acceptance and belonging within their school. Young people who are well appreciated and accepted by their friends are more likely to be happy and do well at school and more likely to develop positive friendships and relationships as adults. In fact, schools in the UK have been found to be the most important place for young people to make friends with others of their own age.

But just what is it that makes an ideal friend? Is it that they should be generous? Or they should be supportive in times of crisis over all else? For the the past six years, my colleagues and I have been conducting the WISERD Education multi-cohort, longitudinal study with pupils in secondary schools, to increase our understanding of the lives of young people in Wales. In our most recent surveys – conducted between February and May 2018 – we were particularly interested in exploring what young people think of their friendship networks. We wanted to know more about how these associations develop and how the relationships impact and shape young people’s identities, behaviour, relationships and perspectives.

We surveyed 895 pupils, aged between ten and 17, from 11 schools across Wales about their friendships. We asked them to choose what they thought were the most important qualities that an ideal friend should possess. They were given 11 different options to choose from – including confidence, honesty, money, popularity and looks – and were allowed to select three options.

We found that a good sense of humour (82%), honesty (67%) and kindness (61%) were the top three qualities that these young people valued the most in their friendships. Perhaps surprisingly, popularity (4%) and intelligence (14%) ranked low in pupils’ choices.

Another interesting takeaway from this study was the qualities that young people consider least important in an ideal friend. Despite the often pretentious and vapid television culture portrayed by popular shows such as Love Island and The Only Way Is Essex, the young people who participated in our survey ranked being good looking (2%), fashionable (3%), rich (3%) and popular (4%) as the least important qualities that they looked for in ideal friends. In fact, none of these qualities were chosen by more than 45 of our 895 respondents.

In addition, we received interesting responses when asking the pupils whether they had school friends who were different from themselves – that is to say, if they had friends who were of a different gender, race or ethnicity at school. Some 84% said they had friends of a different gender at school and 61% indicated that they had friends of different race or ethnicity to themselves at school. This, combined with the quality of “seeing things from other peoples’ perspective” ranking fourth out of the 11 options, suggests that young people today are fairly open minded, and keen to engage with “other” people who don’t just look like them and have the same opinions as them. Instead, they are willing to be open to perspectives that are different from their own.

The qualities that the majority of the pupils and students in this survey chose show that young people are open and engaged in diverse friendships within their learning environments. Our study also supports existing research from England, published in 2006, which found that young people want to be part of strong, safe communities based on friendships that foster trust, concern for individual well-being, a sense of self-worth and that encourage individual and collective social responsibility.

These positive friendships will hopefully result in these young people having more inclusive social engagements and citizenship in their community life as they grow up. This is something we hope to explore in further research, but given what we already know, it is likely that their inclusive friendships will provide them with a wider view of the world.

11/01/2022

Adolescence can be awkward. Here’s how parents can help their child make and maintain good friendships
Secondary school can be a lonely place for adolescents who don’t have a best friend or a group of trusted friends. Young people will be more skilled in the art of making genuine friends (and keeping them) if they know how to be assertive, are optimistic about life, have some basic social skills and have a relationship with a parent/carer that includes honest talk.

Friendship troubles
Secondary school, in particular the junior secondary years, coincides with a time in life when young people are pushing new social and family boundaries. The transition to secondary school is especially demanding as once dependent kids become more independent in a new schooling order of new routines, new teachers, and new friends.

Read more: How parents and teachers can identify and help young people self-medicating trauma with drugs and alcohol

Young people can be cruel and unkind to each other and to adults in this stage of life. Being bullied, teased and left out are signs of friendship troubles. Understandably, victims of bullying feel less positive about the school environment.

Be assertive, not aggressive
Being assertive can help young people in not only sticking up for themselves, but it can also communicate to others a sense of self-assuredness. An assertive way of speaking and being can make young people attractive and more popular with peers.

Assertiveness involves polite but firm talk, eye contact, and controlled behaviour. It’s not to be confused with aggression which often takes the form of a raised voice, insults, put-downs and greedy behaviour.

Good and assertive communication goes a long way. from www.shutterstock.com
One way adults can foster assertiveness in young people is to encourage it in the safe environment of the home. Young people can practice assertive language and behaviour when they explain to siblings that their room is not a public thoroughfare, when they defend their right to use the bathroom by themselves but in a timely way, when they argue they need quiet and time alone to complete homework.

Optimism can lead to success
Grief and tears about friendships are inevitable in the secondary school years. At some stage, your child is likely to come home either sullen, withdrawn, crying or moody. They may even experience school refusal, which is when they refuse, or are reluctant about going to school.

An adolescent who has a positive mindset is more likely to bounce back into the usual routines of friendships. When a young person has a positive mindset, they tend to see setbacks and troubles as temporary. They identify them for what they are (specific, time-related issues) rather than for what they are not (global and eternal).

Encouraging your child to talk about themselves positively at home can help them bounce back when things go wrong. from www.shutterstock.com
That is to say, positive kids are more likely to identify a specific and reasoned account of friendship troubles (“Sally was mean to me today because she was in a terrible mood”) rather than a global and exaggerated account (“Sally is mean, she has always hated me”).

You can foster a positive mindset in your child by modelling and encouraging positive self-talk in the home. Expect your child to be looking forward to something each day at school. That might be catching up with friends, a particular class in school or even an exam or test!

Social skills and being genuine
Adolescents are more likely to fit in and make friendships if they are seen to be socially acceptable by their peers. Ask yourself if your child is comfortable with, and knows how to enter a group situation and greet friends. Does your adolescent mix with friends in the schoolyard during breaks? Does your child talk about their friendships at home? How many of your child’s friends do you know well?

Read more: Popular friends on social media can help save you from disasters

Poor social skills can lead to increased loneliness in adolescents.

Being cool is a strong driver for secondary students. But being authentic is even more appealing. Adolescents recognise and appreciate genuine and authentic people – even if the peer is a bit quirky and seen as an outsider. It’s also a good idea to make contact with teachers at your child’s school to ask about their perceptions of how your child mixes socially with their peers.

Teens who have positive relationships with the adults in their life are more likely to have good relationships with their peers. from www.shutterstock.com
Healthy relationships with adults
Children who have good and healthy relationships with adults are more likely to have good and healthy relationships with their peers. So, it’s important for you to foster a supportive relationship with your child. Try to be an encouraging parent who really listens to your child’s concerns. Your child will not expect you to have all the answers.

But it’s likely a listening ear and a measured and moderate response will be welcomed by your adolescent child. If your child perceives you to be fair, that will go a long way to establishing a solid relationship between adult and child. In turn, it will increase the chance your child will have good relationships with his or her peers.

Read more: Nice guys finish first: empathetic boys attract more close female friends

Adolescence can be tricky to navigate from a parent’s perspective. Making and maintaining healthy friendships is just one battle of the teenage years. Parental role-modelling, encouragement and seeking support from the school can make this aspect of the adolescent years rewarding and fruitful for many years to come.

11/01/2022

11/01/2022