The significance of feeling needed and useful to family and friends for psychological well-being during adolescence.

Introduction: Social relationships offer the opportunity to provide support and resources to others. Feeling needed and useful to others has been understudied during adolescence, despite being shown to predict health and well-being during adulthood. The current study examined this underappreciated way in which family and peer relationships may shape psychological well-being during adolescence.

Method: A cross-sectional sample of high school students across the United States completed an on-line questionnaire during school hours in the fall of 2020. The sample consisted of 1301 adolescents averaging 15.94 (SD = 1.24) years in age in the ninth through twelfth grades, with 48.4% identifying as female, 47.3% as male, and 3.2% reporting either other gender identities or preferring not to answer (1%). Participants identified as Hispanic or Latino (40.2%), European American (19.8%), African American (14.7%), Multiethnic (9.2%), Asian American (7%), Other Ethnicities (7.8%), and 1.3% did not report their ethnicity.

Results: Feeling needed and useful was predicted by both helping and receiving support from others, strongly predicted better psychological well-being, and mediated associations of helping and receiving support with well-being. Males reported feeling more needed by their family as compared to females, and both reported higher levels of being useful to their family than those with other gender identifications.

Conclusions: Like adults, adolescents have a need to contribute and feel needed in their social worlds. Studies of close relationships should incorporate the ways in which youth provide resources and support to others in their lives as well as the sense of feeling needed and useful derived from those activities.