The Significance of Relationships in Developmental Psychopathology and Youth Mental Health.

Abstract

Adaptive relationships play a major role in healthy child development. Caregiver-child relationships have the potential to shape a variety of child developmental outcomes, often based on interactions between child biology and the environment. They lay the foundation for the development of secure attachment, social and cognitive abilities, and physical and mental health [1, 2]. Humans are hard-wired to use social proximity as means of regulation [3]. Reciprocal interactions with caregivers help us to form our self-regulatory abilities [4] and positive relationship experiences with caregivers shape the expectations we have towards people in future relationships. Importantly, not only relationships with caregivers but also those with peers are important to our sense of belonging, impacting children’s well-being [5], and are important contributors to the development of social skills such as empathy [6]. There are circumstances which can compromise the ability of parents to form secure relationships with their offspring: caregivers who suffer from mental illness, have experienced childhood maltreatment, or experience ongoing stress and burden may sometimes lack the sufficient resources to respond adequately to their children’s signals and needs. Maladaptive interaction patterns can be important mediators in the process of intergenerational transmission of psychopathology [7]. Moreover, it is important to consider reciprocal associations between vulnerabilities of both parents and their child. Just as parental mental illness and adverse childhood experiences, child characteristics such as temperament and psychopathology shape the caregiver-child relationship and can pose challenges on parenting. From a developmental perspective, children with biological vulnerability who do not experience sufficient co-regulation by their caregivers are more likely to develop difficulties in self-regulation [8]. Moving forward, more dysregulated children often struggle with peer acceptance, which further diminishes the chance of positive relationship experiences. However, if existent, both positive peer relationships as well as positive caregiver-child relationships have the potential to act as important buffers in the presence of problems in the respective opposite relationship area [9, 10]. As such, interpersonal relationships can be both protector and risk in the context of developmental psychopathology.