Want to Make Sure Your Children Thrive?

Source: Photo by cottonbro studio. Pexels. Free for use.

As parents and caregivers, we often go to crazy lengths to give our children the chance to thrive (aka flourish). Making sure they feel loved is an important part of that but they don’t always feel loved from one day to the next. In this post, I explore how teens feeling less loved on some days (e.g., when parents withdraw love and affection) can have negative implications on thriving a year later.

In my last post, I noted how loved teenagers felt fluctuated from day to day. These fluctuations were directly linked to parents' actions (Coffey et al., 2022). Go check it out—we’ll review some of it below.

Feeling loved is so vital because love connects us to the most important people in our lives. Feeling loved creates a bond and a feeling of support and safety. Further, love can foster exploration and growth because of that support and safety. Finally, how we are loved gives us a model for how to interact with others.

In this post, I explore the links between how much teenagers feel loved and thriving in a new study for which I was a co-author (Xia et al., 2024). To explore this question, we first asked 150 teenagers about their thriving. This included questions about lots of things we know are linked to current and future thriving: optimism, happiness, relationships with others, a sense of purpose, growth, and more.

Then for 21 straight days, teens told us how much they felt loved by their caregivers on a scale from 1-10. A year later, we asked them the same questions about their thriving to see how it changed.

Asking about feeling loved for 21 days gave us two important pieces of information. We had an average for how much they felt loved. We also could tell how much it fluctuated (did it go up and down a lot or was it mostly stable?), where more fluctuations meant less stability. Both of these turned out to be important. As an example, one teen reported feeling loved at all 8s, 9s, or 10s. Teen 1’s average was an 8 and had limited fluctuations. Teen 2 showed much less stability, as reports ranged from 2-10 and those fluctuations also lower the overall average. Here is what we learned from each score.

Level of feeling loved. Teens typically felt loved. The average was 8.6 out of 10 across all days. Even though this average is high, being higher than 8.6 was good for thriving, and being lower decreased thriving a year later. The average was also important for most subdomains of thriving including autonomy, purpose in life, and personal growth. We think this means teens who felt more loved were more comfortable exploring and challenging themselves because they felt unconditional support from their parents.

Stability of feeling loved. For teens, lots of fluctuations or instability were potentially problematic. Some fluctuations near the top, like teen 1, are expected. However, teens with more fluctuations, like teen 2, were less likely to thrive in their other relationships a year later. In other words, teens who report feeling less consistent love from parents struggle with other relationships a year later. Given that relationships are the best predictor of long-term thriving, this is a concerning finding that could suggest far-reaching implications for instability.

Source: Kaysha. Pexels. Free to use.

What can parents do?

In my last post, I gave more tips on ensuring our children feel loved—even when we have conflicts with them. In particular, be sure to show children warmth (e.g., affection, compliments) even on days with conflicts. These don’t have to happen during the conflict. For example, after a conflict, even if emotions are still high, teens still appreciate if you affirm your love for them by saying things like “I know we disagree but I love you no matter what.”

Other research has looked at when parents withhold affection to get a specific behavior or give extra affection to encourage a specific outcome. For example, parents give less affection when children do poorly in school or more affection only when children control their emotions. Thus, the love feels conditional. Look for an in-depth breakdown in an upcoming blog, but here are some quick notes. Using extra warmth and affection or withholding it might get your kid to act a certain way in the moment but over time this is really problematic. Higher conditional regard likely leads to children feeling less loved and love fluctuating more. Further, children start to resent their parents. They experience more mental health problems like depression (e.g., Haines & Schutte, 2023). Finally, they may develop poor relationship skills.

You can still set boundaries and have rules. These are good for children and they expect them. However, how you do it and how you manage conflict days are important to ensure children feel loved and, ultimately, their thriving.