Teenagers who have conflictual, hostile or aggressive relationships with parents or friends are more likely to show early signs of premature aging and look older by the time they’re 30, according to an upcoming University of Virginia study.
Teenagers who have conflictual, hostile or aggressive relationships with parents or friends are more likely to show early signs of premature aging and look older by the time they’re 30, according to a University of Virginia study.
The study, which monitored a group of over 100 people in Virginia starting at age 13, found that “what happens in adolescence, beginning in early adolescence, in relationships with peers, can have lifelong implications for physical health up through age 30,” said Joseph Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who led the study.
The aggression, Allen said, creates a level of stress and activation in the body that increases cortisol level, makes digestion more difficult and decreases the quality of sleep.
Over the yearslong study, researchers monitored and reviewed a combination of factors, including cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and white blood cell counts.
“We look at the constellation of those, and what we find is that constellation looks much worse by age 30 among young people who’ve been engaging in this high conflict path through adolescence and beyond in their key relationships,” Allen said.
That finding proved to be especially true for young people who have relationships rooted in conflict or aggression toward their fathers. Because dads have a tendency to yell louder and be more intimidating, Allen said, that type of conflict is “particularly stressful for adolescents. Adolescents who are willing to engage in conflict with their fathers to the extent that it gets hostile are probably adolescents who are also doing that in the outside world.”
The participants attended the same middle school in a small central Virginia city. Researchers spoke to their parents and peers and watched them interact with people in their lives. Up until they turned 30, experts took blood samples, monitored lung capacity and looked at height and weight.
“Humans are designed to operate with occasional stress that we manage and get past,” Allen said. “But if we’re constantly in relationship stress, especially stress that we’ve created in our relationships, that is terrible for our health.”
The study was observational and not experimental, Allen said, so it’s not necessarily aggressive behavior toward friends and parents that caused the health problems. The young people could have been struggling in other ways, too.
But, Allen said, doctors often ask kids about drug use and sexual behavior, because those things factor into physical wellness. It may be beneficial, he said, to have pediatricians inquire about social relationship quality, because “data suggests that maybe they should be treated like they’re life and death, that they predict things that actually predict dying prematurely overtime.”
The findings may also suggest the value of intervening with kids who have aggressive behavior patterns before their habits are established, Allen said.
Researchers are planning to keep tracking the participants, Allen said, with the hope of learning how the findings may apply to romantic relationship quality and how the patterns that get established as adolescents may predict how those same adolescents will behave as parents.
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