You don’t need me to tell you that parent/teenager relationships are a bit difficult. Firstly there’s that charming hormone avalanche which turns your parent’s once agreeable, docile, curly haired cherub into a screaming, angsty, greasy, door-slamming son of a gun.
Then there’s the whole getting-used-to-the-fact-your-little-girl-is-becoming-sexually-active thing. It’s tricky for everyone involved. I remember when I was about 14, I took my bra off to get more comfortable whilst watching an episode of Cribs (lol), when I got up go get myself a drink. When I returned, my mum was stood in the middle of the living room, red-faced, wielding said bra in the air whilst she screeched about how her heathen daughter had snuck a boy round for some heavy petting and de-virginising* whilst she was out getting ingredients for spag bol. Since I neither had a) a boyfriend nor b) the inclination to move any more than a foot away from the sofa at any given time (this was a particularly sedentary period of my life), I found this accusation offensive. Five minutes later – punch drunk at the injustice of it all – and I ran out of the front door screeching ‘you don’t understand me!’ and collided shin-first into a post box. I needed four stitches.
But arguing with your parents while you’re a teenager can do more than inflict minor injuries – it might actually mess you up your romantically relationships later on in life. According to a new study of nearly 3000 people by the University of Alberta, the relationship we have with our parents during adolescence has a profound effect on our romantic relationships as adults. Apparently, there is direct link between ‘positive’ adolescent-parent relationships and ‘quality’ intimate relationships even up to 15 years later. Teenagers who had more rocky relationships with their parents tended to have more romantic problems later in life.
Apparently, it’s all to do with how successful we feel we have communicated with our parents and making sure that both teen and parent have their views ‘heard’. Mess this up, and you run the risk of messing up communication with your romantic partners and decreasing your ‘success rate’ in love as an adult. So essentially, I'm screwed then.
But it’s not* all* your parents fault. As adults it's our own responsibility to think about our relationships with our parents and make sure that we understand how it impacts on our romantic lives. Matt Johnson, co –author of the report, told the Huffington Post that 'people tend to compartmentalize their relationships; they tend not to see the connection between one kind, such as family relations, and another, like couple unions. But understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognizing any tendency to replicate behaviour—positive or negative—in an intimate relationship.'
Time to give your Mum a friendly phone call?
**Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane **
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.