Family Chaos: Impact on Teen and Adult Mental Health

A recent study conducted in the United Kingdom suggests a potential explanation for why some children in a family may struggle more emotionally than their siblings. According to the findings published in Psychological Science, adolescents who perceive their households as more chaotic, disorganized, or hectic compared to their siblings are more likely to experience mental health issues and engage in problematic behaviors in early adulthood ().

Understanding Perception Disparity: Insights from Twin Studies

Sophie von Stumm, a psychology professor at the University of York, led the research, which involved tracking thousands of twins born in the mid-1990s. The study revealed that teenagers who felt their home environments were less structured or more fast-paced than their siblings reported higher levels of anxiety, depression, substance use, and problem behavior.

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Von Stumm suggests that if future research confirms these findings, psychologists could develop interventions aimed at altering adolescents’ perceptions of their home environments to potentially mitigate these negative effects.

Von Stumm said she’s long been curious about why people who share an experience come away with vastly different perceptions and interpretations of what happened. For her study, she used data from 4,732 same-sex twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), an ongoing examination of twins born in the mid-1990s in England and Wales. She excluded data from opposite-sex twin pairs to rule out potential gender-based differences in perceptions.

Perception Disparity Impact: Long-term Effects on Mental Health

At ages 9, 12, 14, and 16, the twins and their parents rated the level of routine, noise, and general confusion in the home.

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“Some households are more chaotic than others: There’s always a TV or radio playing, different people come and go every day, and there are no routines, like regular bedtimes or mealtimes,” von Stumm explained.

In reviewing responses from the twins at age 16, she observed that siblings could have significantly different views about the atmosphere in their home. One sibling might view the household as far more noisy and fast-paced than the other.

“You’d think the siblings grew up in different families,” von Stumm said. “That’s how subjective their perceptions are.”

At age 23, the twins completed a questionnaire designed to measure their educational attainment, employment status, income, substance use, sexual risk-taking, conflicts with the law, mental health, and behavioral tendencies. Those who had, at age 16, reported experiencing greater household chaos than their twin siblings scored higher on depression, anxiety, antisocial behavior, and other mental health problems. The results were consistent across both identical and fraternal twin pairs.

“Siblings who perceived the household as more chaotic than their brothers or sisters reported poorer mental health outcomes in young adulthood,” von Stumm said. “This association was evident from adolescence onwards, confirming theories that the onset of mental health issues likely is during teenage years.”

Von Stumm said she next plans to explore the precise age and reasons that siblings start to differ in their perceptions of household chaos.

“It is possible that children who experience more adverse events in early life than their siblings, like suffering an injury or being excluded from school, develop a heightened sensitivity to household chaos that then has long-term effects on their mental health,” she said. “Because many common adverse early-life events, such as parental conflict or separation, affect all children of a family, we don’t know yet if there are specific ones that can cause poor long-term mental health.”

Reference:

Growing up with a sibling with depression: A qualitative study in Israel - (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10470950/)

Source-Medindia