Childhood close family relationships and health

Abstract

Emerging data suggest that during childhood, close family relationships can ameliorate the impact that adversity has on life span physical health. To explain this phenomenon, a developmental stress buffering model is proposed in which characteristics of family relationships including support, conflict, obligation, and parenting behaviors evolve and change from childhood to adolescence. Together, these characteristics govern whether childhood family relationships are on balance positive enough to fill a moderating role in which they mitigate the effects that childhood adversities have on physical health. The benefits of some family relationship characteristics are hypothesized to stay the same across childhood and adolescence (e.g., the importance of comfort and warmth from family relationships) whereas the benefits of other characteristics are hypothesized to change from childhood to adolescence (e.g., from a need for physical proximity to parents in early childhood to a need for parental availability in adolescence). In turn, close, positive family relationships in childhood operate via a variety of pathways, such as by reducing the impact that childhood stressors have on biological processes (e.g., inflammation) and on health behaviors that in turn can shape physical health over a lifetime. (PsycINFO Database Record

Figure 1

Figure 1 depicts the Developmental Stress Buffering Model. The main effects model (bottom row) depicts childhood stressors having an impact on lifespan health through psychological responses to stress and biological and health behavior pathways. The moderator model states that childhood family relationships can serve in a stress-buffering capacity, but an assessment of relationships has to balance both the positive and negative features of close relationships (hence the scales with +/− signs), and also has to acknowledge developmental changes in relationships. Here the importance of certain characteristics of family relationships is proposed to stay the same (bold), while others change in importance from childhood to adolescence (italics).