Calling home: Adolescent–family roots of adult resilience during the COVID pandemic

This study examined adolescent-family relationship predictors of adult-era resilience in the face of the COVID pandemic, considering both mental and physical health outcomes. Adolescents (99 female, 85 male; 107 White, 53 African American, 15 mixed race/ethnicity, 9 from other minority groups) were followed from age 18 to 38 utilizing both observational and self-report assessments. After accounting for levels of functioning pre-COVID, adolescents who demonstrated a capacity to handle disagreements without becoming engaged in relatedness-undermining hostile behavior in mother-adolescent dyads went on as adults to experience relatively fewer depressive symptoms and better physical health quality post-COVID onset (Direct β's = 0.28 and -0.17, respectively). Follow-up analyses suggested these effects were potentially mediated by maternal reports of adult-era quality of the mother-participant relationship, by level of ongoing maternal contact, and by lower levels of loneliness. Evidence was also found that maintaining contact with fathers in adulthood predicted better health outcomes post-pandemic. Results are taken as supporting a systems approach to understanding resilience, as Luthar has suggested, and identifying the mother-adolescent relationship as a potential long-term protective factor well into mid-adulthood.