Loneliness, Mental Health, and Parent Relationships (2024)

Undergraduate: Cabel Jarrett

Faculty Advisor: Andrea Hussong
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Existing literature widely suggests that socialization skills are related to mental health outcomes. Some researchers even suggest that deviant social skills in childhood are core predictive pathways to substance use. Socioemotional learning occurs in many contexts: at school with peers, at home in digital spaces, and during parent/child interactions. Parents are in a unique position because they not only contribute directly to social skill building during child interactions, but they also influence the peers a given child is exposed to. Loneliness and social isolation have mental health implications as shown by many findings following COVID-19. However, little research has been done that investigates the moderating role parent relationships might have on loneliness, substance use, anxiety, and depression. This study seeks to close the gap between existing evidence of socialization pathways to substance use and the important influence of parent relationships. This analysis is based on the REAL-U follow up study with 142 undergraduate participants. This study found loneliness, anxiety, and depression to be associated with one another. However, loneliness was not associated with substance use in our sample. Father relationships were correlated with levels of anxiety and depression while mother relationships did not show a significant relationship. Parent relationships did not moderate the relationship between loneliness and mental health. Future studies should test other interactions such as a mediational relationship and consider alternative variables such as stress that may capture a more holistic developmental context.