Social support is fundamentally important for mental health among adolescents and emerging adults: Evidence across relationships and phases of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

People are fundamentally driven to seek support, care, and validation from others. These are aspects of social support. Feeling sufficiently supported and cared for is important for wellness and mental health across adolescent and emerging adult development. Further, social support is valuable for wellness across both “mundane” periods of daily life as well as during times of turmoil and uncertainty. Guided by multiple frameworks on social motivation, social cognition, and ecological frameworks of development, we aimed to replicate and expand insights about social support, wellness, and mental health for adolescents and emerging adults, studying people living through periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied reports of social support, coping and distress, and mental health concerns (i.e., depression and anxiety) from middle and high school age adolescents, as well as college-going emerging adults recruited during periods of COVID quarantine and following returns to in-person activities in the United States. Across eight samples, social support showed positive relations with coping strategies and negative relations with depressive and anxious problems. These findings were relevant for both adolescents and emerging adults; supported across multiple time points; involved support from family, friends, and other peers; and were sustained during periods of quarantine and the return to face-to-face daily activities. Our work both replicates and extends insights on the essential needs of feeling supported by close others for wellness and mental health and underscores the value of investing in additional infrastructure that can foster social support across multiple relationship domains (i.e., improving family relations and building spaces for peer and friend engagement in schools).