The Friend Who Knows Your Teen Matters More Than the Group That Accepts Them

If you wanted a clue about how your teenager might be doing at 30, where would you look? Most of us would check grades, activities or the college list. Some of us would look at how well they get along with us. A long line of research from the University of Virginia suggests another place worth watching: whether your teen has one friend who really knows them.

A Clue That Showed Up Seventeen Years Later

Joseph Allen, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has followed a diverse group of young people since they were 13, starting at a public middle school in the Southeast. In a 2022 paper drawing on 171 of them, assessed again and again from age 13 to 30, he and his colleagues found that teens who were more skilled at building close friendships went on to report fewer depressive symptoms at ages 27 to 30. The researchers described the link as substantial.

A second analysis from the same project, with 184 adolescents from central Virginia, found that the quality of a teen's close friendship was a better predictor of adult relationships with peers and romantic partners than parents' own reports of the parent and teen relationship.

That second finding stings a little. We like to think our relationship with our kids is the main event. It matters enormously. But in this study, the close friend turned out to be the stronger clue to how young people would handle relationships later on.

Two honest cautions. These findings come from one regional community cohort of under 200 people, and they are correlational. They show that close friendship in adolescence went with better adult outcomes. They do not prove that friendship caused them. It is entirely possible that teens who were already doing well found it easier to build close friendships.

Accepted by Many, Known by One

I think this research matters so much for families because of what it says about the group. When we worry about our kids socially, we usually worry about the group. Are they included? Invited? Part of something? Those are fair questions. But acceptance by a group and being known by a friend are different experiences, and they ask different things of a young person.

A group often accepts you on its terms. You learn the jokes, the clothes, the opinions that are safe to share. Many teens get very good at this, and some of them are lonely in the middle of it. A close friend works differently. That friendship only deepens when you let someone see what you actually think, what you're afraid of and what you care about when nobody's grading you. In other words, close friendship is where a teen practices being themselves with another person watching.

Berna Güroğlu at Leiden University is among the researchers who treat forming and keeping friendships as one of the central tasks of adolescence. In one study with 123 young people aged 8 to 28, led by Elisabeth Schreuders with Güroğlu, brain responses to winning rewards for a best friend changed with age only among those whose best friendship stayed stable. It is a small brain imaging study and best read as suggestive. But it fits the larger picture: steady friendship seems to be part of how young people grow.

Why So Many Teens Feel Alone in a Crowd

This matters more now because teen loneliness has climbed. In an analysis of about 1 million 15 and 16 year olds, Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and her colleagues found that school loneliness rose from 2012 to 2018 in 36 of 37 countries, and that nearly twice as many teens reported high levels of it by 2018. Researchers still disagree about why. Twenge points to smartphones as a likely driver, while others, including Candice Odgers, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, argue that the evidence linking phones to teen distress is mostly correlational and the effects are small. Allen has offered his own hypothesis, not yet a tested finding, that young people may have moved away from strong peer connections.

Whatever the cause, close friends seem to matter when life gets hard. In a study of 7,250 UK secondary students by a team led by Jesus Montero-Marin and Willem Kuyken of the University of Oxford, with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of the University of Cambridge, having a friend during the pandemic lockdown was one of the factors linked with less decline in mental health, alongside a positive school climate and a strong connection at home.

Making Room for the One Who Gets Them

Ask about the one, not the many. "Who do you not have to explain yourself to?" tells you more than "Were you invited?" I wrote about asking better questions in Stop Asking "How Are You Doing?"

Make your home easy to visit. Close friendships need unhurried time together, and many families have quietly stopped opening their doors, as I explored in We Stopped Hosting Each Other.

Don't judge a friendship by its status. The friend your teen trusts may not be the most popular kid or the one you would have chosen. Notice instead whether your teen seems more like themselves after time together.

Protect the friendship when schedules get crowded. Practices, tutoring and part-time jobs fill calendars fast. A close friend can't be booked into the gaps.

Years from now, your teen may not remember which group took them in at 14. They will likely remember who knew them. Acceptance asks you to match the group, but being known asks only that you stay yourself long enough for someone to notice.

Research cited

Allen, J. P., et al. (2022). A social-development model of the evolution of depressive symptoms from age 13 to 30. Development and Psychopathology.

Allen, J. P., et al. (2021). When friendships surpass parental relationships as predictors of long-term outcomes: Adolescent relationship qualities and adult psychosocial functioning. Child Development.

Schreuders, E., et al. (2021). Friendship stability in adolescence is associated with ventral striatum responses to vicarious rewards. Nature Communications.

Twenge, J. M., et al. (2021). Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness. Journal of Adolescence.

Montero-Marin, J., et al. (2023). Young people's mental health changes, risk, and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Network Open.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.