Adolescents' well‐being: The role of basic needs fulfilment in family context

Abstract

Although there is an increasing interest in studying the relations between the satisfaction of basic psychological needs and well‐being, this association for both parents and adolescents has been to some extent disregarded within the self‐determination theory. The present study was aimed at testing a model of relations between father, mother, and adolescent’s perception of basic needs fulfilment and well‐being. Participants were 98 co‐living family units of mother, father, and adolescents (54% males) aged from 12 to 18 years (M = 15.11, SD = 1.44). Results confirm that basic needs fulfilment was predictive of well‐being in all participants. Moreover, the needs fulfilment of both parents seemed to play a relevant role directly on the perceived needs satisfaction of their adolescents, and indirectly on their well‐being, through the adolescent’s needs satisfaction. Results are discussed in terms of practical implications for the promotion of positive youth development.

Transmission of Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction between Parents and Adolescents: The Critical Role of Parental Perceptions

“…We thus expected to find associations between some of the basic need satisfactions of parents and adolescents. However, while our correlational analysis basically replicated the significant positive correlations between parents' and adolescents' BPNS (see Tables 2 and 4) found in the literature (e.g., Lo Cricchio et al, 2021;Nishimura et al, 2021), results from our two longitudinal analyses did not detect such influence over time. More specifically, parents' need satisfaction did not reliably predict adolescents' need satisfaction (no parental need effect) and adolescents' need satisfaction did not predict parents' need satisfaction (no child's needs effect).…”

“…While the satisfaction of basic psychological needs is posited to occur in social relationships, studies on BPNS transmission in parent-child relationships are still lacking. Only a small number of studies on BPNS in parents and children exists (e.g., Lo Cricchio et al, 2021;Nishimura et al, 2021), but most of them are cross-sectional, examine basic needs as one concept, and do not assess parents' perception of their child's need satisfaction. Our first exploratory study and our second preregistered confirmatory study aimed to respond to these limitations to better understand the interplay of basic psychological needs between parents and adolescents over time.…”

“…Studies generally find that greater BPNS in parents is associated with greater BPNS in their adolescent (Costa et al, 2019;Lo Cricchio et al, 2021;Nishimura et al, 2021). We thus expected to find associations between some of the basic need satisfactions of parents and adolescents.…”

“…While previous studies either used a sample of children (van der Kaap-Deeder et al, 2015) or only observed cross-sectional associations in parent-adolescent dyads (Costa et al, 2019;Lo Cricchio et al, 2021;Nishimura et al, 2021), this paper examined the changes in BPNS between parents and adolescents. By adolescence, it is possible that parents' influence on their child has stabilized.…”

Transmission of Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Between Parents and Adolescents: The Critical Role of Parental Perceptions

“…An experimental study among Belgian mother-adolescent dyads showed that the self-reported BPNS of adolescents and mothers were positively and moderately correlated during a recorded conversation (Wuyts et al, 2018). Other cross-sectional studies among Italian (Costa et al, 2019;Lo Cricchio et al, 2021) and Japanese (Nishimura et al, 2021) parents and adolescents reported moderate positive associations between parents' and adolescents' overall BPNS.…”