Our Youth’s Perspective 2026: The Importance of Friendships & Romantic Relationships

• Transcript

  Ron Dahl As we mature throughout adolescence, the types and depth of our relationships often change. These relationships are important not only for what they provide in our adolescent years, but also as formative learning experiences

  Brooke Smith Talking to people; talking to someone that they trust about what they’re feeling and these intense emotions that they’re feeling and giving themselves time before reacting emotionally and learning to step back and think about situations, I think is also very important. 

  Ron Dahl What they teach us about ourselves and others will carry forward to relationships we have as adults. 

  Ananshaa Singh It kind of made me realize that the relationships I have now are sort of like a platform for the relationships I’m going to have as an adult.

  Ron Dahl This learning isn’t always smooth sailing. We learn as much, or more, about being in relationships from friction as we are learning to care–to navigate difficulties, and to repair when things go wrong and someone gets hurt. 

  Danari Golden Having a high-quality relationship doesn’t just mean that, like, oh, yeah, there’s no arguments and everything is all nice and dandy and rainbows and butterflies. It was just like the communication there is just it’s nice and there isn’t like something that’s so drastic that’ll end the relationship as a whole.

  Ron Dahl And it’s not just romantic relationships–what we learn with our friends is critical to how we learn about relationships.

  Layah Belay Simmons I think it’s important to talk about the quality of your friendships when you’re talking about the quality of your relationships.

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  Ron Dahl I’m Ron Dahl, founding director of the Center for the Developing Adolescent, and this is Adaptivity, where we explore the science of adolescence, untangling misconceptions about the years between childhood and adulthood.

  We explore new insights into the rapid cognitive, emotional, and social changes that are happening during these years. And how the developing adolescent brain is primed to promote healthy and adaptive learning.

  During adolescence, developmental changes in our brains and social contexts combine to create new motivations to connect with and to matter to other people. We begin to form deeper, more lasting friendships and romantic attachments, as we learn to build trust and intimacy and to navigate more complex relationship challenges like jealousy. This is formative learning that can shape the quality of our relationships throughout adulthood.

  This is the second episode of our annual three-part Adaptivity miniseries, where we talk to members of our Youth Scientific Council, a group of high school and college students who work with the Center for the Developing Adolescent to help us inform and communicate the science. 

  In this episode we hear from YSCA members Brooke Smith, Danari Golden, Layah Belay Simmons, and Ananshaa Singh who talk with professor Hannah Schacter from Wayne State University in Detroit. They discuss friendships and romantic relationships during adolescence and how the quality of these relationships can shape our connections with each other throughout our lives.

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  Danari Golden My name is Danari Golden. I’m a senior at Westchester High School located in Westchester near LAX.

  Anansha Singh Hi, my name is Ananshaa Singh and I’m a senior at Palisades Charter High School.

  Layah Belay Simmons My name is Layah Belay Simmons and I am a senior at University High School Charter.

  Brooke Smith Hi, my name is Brooke Smith and I’m also a senior at University High School Charter.

  Layah Belay Simmons Today we’re curious about relationships made during adolescence and the impact they have throughout the years.

  Ananshaa SIngh We’re going to be talking about how friend and romantic relationships manifest from adolescence and what the impacts are.

  Danari Golden So this means discussing the social stigma and why adolescents feel the need for romantic relationships.

  Brooke Smith We actually see this every day in school, and our friend groups how strong the need for connection is. I wonder if there’s a reason for that.

  Layah Belay Simmons Adolescent romantic relationships can be an important part of many young people’s lives, and they have the ability to shape the way people are as adults. Because of all this, we have decided to sit down with Dr. Hanna Schachter to discuss adolescent peer relationships. She’s an associate professor of psychology at Wayne State University in Detroit and an adjunct faculty member at the Merrill-Palmer Skillman Institute for Child and Family Development. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Schachter.

  Hannah Schacter It’s so nice to meet you all.

  Layah Belay Simmons Dr. Schachter, can you share a little bit of your research with us?

  Hannah Schacter Sure. So I am a developmental psychologist by training and I’m particularly interested in adolescent social development and health. So a lot of my research focuses on understanding how the relationships that adolescents develop during those teenage years, particularly peer relationships as well as romantic relationships, how those have both short and long term effects on things like mental and physical health outcomes, as well as educational adjustment and even relationships later in life.

  Brooke Smith This is Brooke. What are peer and romantic relationships like during adolescence, and why are they so important?

  Hannah Schacter So what’s interesting is that even within the adolescent years, romantic relationships can dramatically change in what they look like and what their impact is. So we see that early in adolescence, especially those middle school years when romantic relationships are really just becoming sort of a new prospect on the back of puberty and everything that that brings. 

  A lot of the time, those early years, we’re seeing things like crushes and maybe very short-lived dating-type dynamics. Whereas as adolescents progress further along into middle and late adolescence, so getting closer to those high school years and even maybe early post-high school romantic relationships start to become a little bit more serious. We see relationships lasting longer, and they also start to become more of a context for seeking out and providing social support for developing intimacy and trust, and that can also bring some challenges. Things like jealousy, how to balance your peer relationships and friendships with romantic relationships. 

  So in many ways, romantic relationships deepen across adolescence, but that can also make them at times more challenging just because there’s so many emotions involved and new experiences that teens really haven’t had a chance to practice yet, except for in some of their platonic social relationships.

  Brooke Smith So does experiencing relationships during adolescence help with forming new relations in the future?

  Hannah Schacter Absolutely. Adolescent romantic relationships and peer relationships in general are super important for offering preparation for other relationships later in life into young and even later in adulthood. What’s really interesting about romantic relationships is that it’s not as much about the quantity. So just because you’ve dated a bunch of people in adolescence or had a lot of romantic relationships, that in itself isn’t necessarily going to effectively prep you to, to be in an adult romantic relationship that you feel satisfied and happy with. 

  It’s really about the quality of those early relationships. So being in a romantic relationship where you are able to effectively navigate conflict, where you feel supported, where you’re able to establish trust and intimacy, that really provides a foundation for then developing relationships that sort of mirror that as an adult. 

  The other interesting thing about adolescent relationships, sort of setting you up for success later, is that it’s not just about your adolescent romantic relationships. So we might think, oh, if you have really high-quality romantic relationships as a teen that preps you well as an adult for the same thing. But it turns out that your friendships and your peer relationships in adolescence are also really critical for setting you up to effectively navigate and be happy and content in an adult relationship. 

  So there’s some research showing that the quality of your friendships during those middle and high school years, more so than the qualities of your romantic relationships, or things like physical attractiveness or your popularity in the peer group, the quality of your friendships is one of the best predictors of how satisfied you’ll feel in your romantic relationships as an adult.

  Danari Golden Hi, Denari speaking again, you brought up, like, the fact of like, high-quality relationships. Like what do you consider like a high-quality relationship?

  Hannah Schacter That’s a great question. A lot of the time when we hear high quality, we might think exclusively positive and conflict-free. And that’s not necessarily true. So certainly a high-quality relationship is one in adolescence characterized by mutual support. So having a context where you can not only receive support when you need a lift, but also being able to provide support to the other person. 

  It’s also relationships characterized by high levels of trust, a willingness to engage in what we call intimate disclosure. So essentially having someone that you feel comfortable sharing your secrets with and receiving their secrets in return. It’s also relationships where when conflict arises, because we know it inevitably does, that you are able to move through and past it in a productive way. 

  So being able to talk through and problem solve. Problem solving is one of the key markers of effective conflict resolution in all relationships, but including in adolescence. Whereas things like ignoring or icing someone out or perhaps excluding or retaliating with a lot of anger and defensiveness, those are features of conflict resolution that can actually worsen or even disintegrate a relationship. 

  A high-quality friendship or romantic relationship is one where we see all of those positive features, and you can see that other person sort of as a secure base, and also being able to navigate the hard times in a productive and healthy way.

  Layah Belay Simmons This is Layah speaking. Do our adolescent romantic relationships shape the way we socialize with people in our adult lives?

  Hannah Schacter Absolutely. Going back to what I was saying previously, there is good evidence that the quality of both friendships as well as romantic relationships in adolescence seem to have predictive value for what our relationships will look like as adults. 

  What’s also interesting is the role that, what we see as younger children in family contexts can play a role. So, for example, there is evidence that adolescents who have been exposed to a lot of interparental conflict–so parents who are arguing a lot and particularly aggressive with one another–that those teens are then more likely to end up in romantic relationships characterized by higher levels of aggression. And some of the explanation for that, one potential theory is that there is some social learning happening, and that means that when you’re growing up and you’re witnessing a certain set of behaviors as the norm, you start to adopt that yourself as this is what you do. I am mirroring what my parents do. 

  This might also be the case if parents are aggressive towards the child themself. Another and related theory is this idea of what’s called an internal working model. What that refers to is that when we witness or experience people in our family engaging in different types of behavior. In this case, let’s say aggressive behavior. We develop certain expectations for what relationships are like. We solve problems by yelling at each other, or we navigate conflict with a lot of explosive anger. Then in later relationships, even if it’s no longer in the family context and you’re out on your own in a friendship or a romantic relationship that may carry over, and there’s a certain expectation for what will happen and then sort of self-select into those types of relationships. 

  So it’s not only that the features and quality of peer relationships and adolescents have implications for later relationships in adulthood, but also that some of those family dynamics can intersect with that.

  Danari Golden This is Danari speaking. How do the adolescents that, like, are so familiar with the aggressiveness in, like, their families and they go and like find something that goes hand in hand with that, like in a relationship. Do they ever grow out of that?

  Hannah Schacter I would say that it’s certainly not deterministic in the sense that not every teen or child who is exposed to aggression in their family context goes on to enter a romantic relationship where there’s aggression, there’s a higher likelihood than those that are not exposed to that at home. But it’s certainly not a 1-to-1 ratio. 

  The good news there is that that suggests that there are factors that can interrupt that relationship or that association, or factors that can kind of moderate or modulate it. So one example of this, it’s not specifically in the context of family aggression, but some research that I was involved with as a graduate student, we were looking at adolescents’ peer relationships during middle and high school, and whether that was related to aggressive behavior in their subsequent romantic relationships. And we found that in general, adolescents who were rejected by peers, who were really disliked by peers during adolescence, several years later, were more likely to be in romantic relationships where they were perpetrating aggression. So they were doing things like yelling at their partner, or maybe even being physically aggressive or emotionally manipulative. 

  But we found that that relationship was actually weakened. So it was sort of, there was a buffering effect if those teens that were rejected by peers still had at least a couple high-quality friendships. So plenty of youth who are bullied or rejected still establish at least one, maybe more friendships. And if those friendships were characterized by those positive features, we’ve been talking about things like a lot of support, trust, security, that that served as a buffer. 

  So we think that having some positive relationships, even in the case of going through whether it’s in the family or peer group being exposed to aggression or rebuff, that that can actually help compensate. And I think that speaks to the power of positive social relationships during adolescence, that they might have the potential to help rewrite some of our underlying thoughts or expectations around what relationships look like.

  Ananshaa Singh This is Ananashaa. How does strict social restrictions, similar to conditions during the pandemic, affect growing adolescent relationships?

  Hannah Schacter Yeah, the pandemic has, I think, taught us a lot and perhaps confirmed things that we already suspected. I can say anecdotally and maybe intuitively, there’s a lot of negative repercussions of having such strict social restrictions and isolation during the pandemic. 

  Anyone who went through it themselves can probably attest to many of the challenges that brought as far as being so distanced for most of our social relationships. What’s interesting and important is now we’re starting to see actual data and scientific findings come out from studies that were conducted either before and after or during and after the pandemic. And so we’re starting to actually gather some some solid research evidence that sort of confirms those suspicions that the absence of in-person, consistent social contact was really difficult and negatively impactful, again, for everyone, but especially for adolescents who during those teenage years, it’s such a crucial time to be establishing and exploring social relationships. 

  We know that social media and texting and all of these online mechanisms of staying in touch certainly helped to allow for some sort of social connection and contact and, you know, support seeking. But those on their own are not necessarily enough. All of you who are at school every day can probably appreciate those informal opportunities to connect with peers walking in hallways, lunch, extracurricular activities. And when you’re in a Zoom classroom, it’s just much harder to capitalize on those passing sort of casual moments for interaction. 

  So in general, what we’re seeing is that the pandemic and its social restrictions had a negative impact, all told, on adolescent social relationships. 

  However, what’s interesting is there’s some evidence, including some research from my own lab showing that there are particular individuals or groups of individuals who may have had a sort of silver lining of being in these online contexts. So I do a lot of research on bullying and adolescence experiences with being bullied. And what we found is that when we compared teens who were attending exclusively online school versus those that were in a hybrid or even an in-person format, as restrictions started to ease, we actually saw higher rates of bullying among the students who were back in school in person and among those who were experiencing bullying, whether it was online or in person. The effects of it, the negative impact in terms of its effects on anxiety was more intensified for those that were in an in-person setting. 

  So that suggested to us that for youth who at least are having some social difficulties and maybe being regularly targeted and harassed by their peers, there may have been something about those online schooling contexts that offered this sort of safe haven or protection. Even though collectively it seems like that environment was not advantageous for most.

  Ananshaa Singh Do you think that the increase in bullying after the pandemic was due to, like, the long period of time where people weren’t able to interact with peers and individuals their own age?

  Hannah Schacter That’s definitely a possibility. There could have been this almost rebound effect, where teens were cooped up in online school and then suddenly reemerge in an in-person context, and there’s some spillover of things that either were happening behind the scenes, or what we often see is that bullying tends to increase during transitional periods. 

  And it can be kind of a form of establishing a social hierarchy. So if you think of aggression being a tool to gain power and prestige in the peer group and establish yourself as dominant, that tends to be a more common behavioral pattern. When people are in a new or uncertain setting, so like the transition to middle school, you’re suddenly with new peers. Aggression becomes a tool for setting yourself up as the top dog or whatever it is. 

  So you could argue that that transition from online schooling back into an in-person context almost created a fresh start in a way where peers had been separated or at least distanced for so long that there was this reemergence of a need to create this, this peer hierarchy. And that could have accounted for it. If I, you know, if I had a research wish list, it would be having some pre-pandemic data to be able to compare. But I think that’s a great hypothesis that some of those escalations could have been this sort of bounce back effect post pandemic.

  Brooke Smith This is Brooke. Why do relationships feel so much more intense during adolescence? And what changes in the brain cause them to feel different compared to relationships in adulthood?

  Hannah Schacter During adolescence, there is really rapid development of brain regions that are important for emotion processing, as well as those that are related to reward sensitivity. And what that means is that during those teenage years, positive experiences feel especially enjoyable and pleasurable. So that might be things like spending time with friends, whereas negative experiences can be especially harmful and feel especially intense. 

  The other part of this is it’s not only that we see accelerated development in brain regions that are important for things like seeking out sensation and wanting to experience pleasure and reward. But we also see slower, relatively speaking, development of brain regions that are really important for decision making, for advanced and logical reasoning. And so when you pair those two together. When adolescents are experiencing socially intense, whether positive or negative experiences, we see a very amplified emotional reaction without necessarily having the tools yet to be able to think through in sort of a more reasoned and logical way. 

  And again, this isn’t a bad thing. This is what helps adolescents be able to go out and feel motivated to explore, to take risks, both unhealthy risks, things like texting and driving, but also really healthy risks like auditioning for a school performance or asking someone out on a date. Those are scary things. And so it’s really important that our brains are set up in a way that motivates those behaviors because they help with identity formation and with establishing relationships and maintaining them. 

  So it’s certainly not to say that this is some sort of malfunction in the teenage brain. It’s actually a real asset. But it does also help explain why negative experiences, especially when they’re socially related and we’re much more socially oriented towards peers during those adolescent years, you’re spending much more time with peers at school and the changes that are happening in those brain regions really socially reorient adolescents towards the peer group, making peer interactions, for better or for worse, particularly impactful.

  Brooke Smith Thank you for that. And to follow up, if negative, how should the adolescent go about navigating those intense feelings? Or should the adolescents worry about the intense feelings they feel?

  Hannah Schacter I think that some of it is just being aware of why it’s happening. I do a lot of, uh, talks and workshops with local high schoolers and learning about the architecture of the teenage brain and what’s actually happening in some ways is empowering. It helps put things in perspective that, oh, this is why I’m feeling this way, or this is why that was so hard, or this is why that felt so good. So I think a first step is for there to be–and this is why the work that you all are doing is so important and wonderful–is just spreading more awareness about what is happening developmentally during those adolescent years. 

  And then from there, thinking about providing effective tools for how to manage those feelings. I think social support is a huge one. Again, because peer relationships become so important in those adolescent years and peer influence is so strong oftentimes. And I think the tide is changing on this a bit, but oftentimes there’s a lot of talk about peer pressure and how it’s a negative thing. And peer influence is framed as this. That’s the reason that teenagers are engaging in all these scary, risky behaviors. But peer influence can be, again, a really positive thing and really motivate you to engage in positive risk-taking behaviors like standing up for a peer who’s bullied or struggling. 

  And so I think that making sure that you’re in those moments of emotional intensity, seeking out support from your peer group and your close friends, that can provide a really important protective function.

  Danari Golden So I have one last question. This is Danari speaking. How can schools or parents or communities support adolescents in building, like, healthy peer and romantic relationships?

  Hannah Schacter I think it starts with talking more about it. I think sometimes there’s an assumption that teens know or should know how to establish healthy relationships, and that’s something that just comes naturally. And I don’t necessarily always think it does. One thing that we’ve been doing in my lab recently, because I’ve been motivated by the exact question you just asked. What can we actually do? 

  We’ve been developing an online program that teaches adolescents about the science of friendship, and what we actually know from research about what makes a healthy friendship versus what are some red flags to watch out for. Understanding how friendships affect our health and well-being. And so the goal there is to take some of what we’ve established as researchers and we’re very familiar with, but isn’t necessarily getting out there into the hands of who it should be with, which is adolescents themselves and schools and families. 

  And so that’s one step we’re trying to take is providing some actual education around friendships and peer relationships that really isn’t formally incorporated in any way into things like middle and high school. Maybe you get a health course or a sex ed class, but do you ever learn about how to navigate sticky, challenging friendship issues? I’m not so sure. At least I didn’t. 

  So I think that what I had said previously about awareness. The kind of work that Center for Developing Adolescent is doing as far as reaching stakeholders and teens themselves and providing awareness about both the challenges, but also the many, many wonderful developments that are happening during adolescence and the sort of superpowers that adolescents have given so many of the the dramatic changes that are happening. 

  I think that shifting the narrative to be one that’s really more positive and strengths focused, and then providing adolescents and their networks with the tools to effectively manage the health of their relationships.

  Layah Belay Simmons This is Leah speaking. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Schachter.

  Hannah Schacter Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful talking to you all.

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  Brooke Smith That was a really interesting conversation with Dr. Schachter. Something that really stood out to me, I think, was why relationships feel so intense when we’re teenagers and what’s actually happening in the adolescent brain that makes these emotions feel so much stronger compared to adulthood.

  Danari Golden One thing I also found interesting was the, like, the concept of a, like, high-quality relationship, because she brought up the fact that, like, during adolescence, there are low-quality relationships and there’s high-quality relationships. And she, um, like having a high-quality relationship doesn’t just mean that, like, oh, yeah, there’s no arguments and everything is all nice and dandy and rainbows and butterflies. It was just like the communication there is just it’s nice and there isn’t like something that’s so drastic that’ll end the relationship as a whole.

  Layah Belay Simmons Yeah. I think it’s important to talk about the quality of your friendships when you’re talking about the quality of your relationships, because I thought the part that she mentioned about the quality of friendships affecting the quality of romantic relationships was really interesting.

  Ananshaa Singh Yeah, I was gonna say, I agree. I thought that it was an interesting take on relationships and I have never really looked at relationships as being high-quality or low-quality.

  Danari Golden For me personally, it was making me think about the future. And just, like, just because I was brought up in, like, in like healthy relationships and like my relationships with my friends and just like in general are high-quality. Some person I might meet, their relationships in their adolescence were, might have been, like, low-quality. It just puts into perspective, like how to see everybody else and not just really like, think about, like, the now.

  Ananshaa Singh Yeah. To add on, I also think it kind of made me reflect on my friendships that I have and made me feel like grateful for those, especially because as she was talking about all of that, it kind of made me realize that the relationships I have now are sort of like a platform for the relationships I’m going to have as an adult.

  Layah Belay Simmons I think that one way adults could help adolescents during this time is by helping them learn healthy communication skills.

  Brooke Smith I would also like to add on to that, and I think it definitely kind of ties back into the intense feelings that the youth feels during these types of relationships. And I think communication, like Layah mentioned, talking to people, talking to someone that they trust about what they’re feeling and these intense emotions that they’re feeling and giving themselves time before reacting emotionally and learning to step back and think about situations, I think is also very important and focusing on supportive and high quality relationships and things that really benefit you and nurture you, I think is also very important.

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  Layah Belay Simmons That sums up our podcast for today. We went over the impact of adolescent romantic relationships on development into adulthood. During this time, we gathered Dr. Hanna Schachter’s thoughts and feelings on the relationships between peers and romantic partners in adolescence and how they shaped them mentally throughout the years.

  Danari Golden Thank you for listening. This has been Danari.

  Ananshaa Singh Ananshaa

  Layah Belay Simmons Layah

  Brooke Smith and Brooke

  Danari Golden Please check out the next episode about social media and how technology influences peer and familial relationships during adolescence.

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  Ron Dahl Adolescence is a window of intense social learning. It is a period of discovering fundamentally new aspects of who we are, through deeper, more meaningful connections with others. As we build our capacities to navigate conflict, establish trust and intimacy. As we learn how to give and receive, with vulnerability and deep caring with friends and romantic partners. This formative relational learning in adolescence contributes to becoming caring adults, creating capacities for building and nurturing quality relationships throughout our lives. 

  I’m Ron Dahl, and this has been a special episode of Adaptivity from the Center for the Developing Adolescent.

  We’d like to thank Brooke Smith, Danari Golden, Layah Belay Simmons, and Ananshaa Singh from the Center’s Youth Scientific Council on Adolescence for delving into this topic and sharing their reflections with us.

  Thanks also to professor Hannah Schacter from Wayne State University.

  For more on the developmental science of adolescence and the YSCA, go to our website at developingadolescent.org.

  If you’d like to learn more about the science of adolescence, visit us at adaptivitypodcast.com or share your thoughts through the contact information at our website.

  Our podcast is produced at UC Berkeley for the Center for the Developing Adolescent. Our senior producer is Polly Stryker. Our producer is Meghan Lynch Forder. And our engineer is Rob Speight.

  A special thanks to Ava Trimble for her facilitation of the YSCA projects.

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