Experiencing loneliness in adolescence in relation to parent-child relationships

The issue of parent-child relationships in adolescence is rarely researched. The period of adolescence is a crisis stage of active restructuring of the internal behaviors of a person and the transformation of external environments, including the social situation of development, the stage when the loneliness phenomenon acquires special significance. A person of adolescence both faces the age-specific task of forming intimacy and finds a resource in the state of being alone with oneself. When studying this phenomenon, researchers rarely consider it in relation to the actively changing parent-child relationships. A hypothesis of the study is that children of parents, who demonstrate hypoprotection as the leading type of upbringing, experience more severe loneliness in adolescence. An empirical study of the relationship between the experience of loneliness and the characteristics of parent-child relations was carried out on a sample of 96 “parent – child” diads, Mx=19.6 years, σ=1.9. To collect psychodiagnostic material, the authors used the “Analysis of Family Relationships technique” by E.G. Eydemiller and V.V. Yustitskis and the “Differential Questionnaire for Experiencing Loneliness” (short version) by D.A. Leontiev and E.N. Osin. As a result of statistical analysis, the authors identified a number of regularities expressed in reliable interrelations between such disharmonious tendencies in parent-child relationships as hyperprotection, insufficiency of requirements-duties, insufficiency of requirements-prohibitions, immaturity of parental feelings, the projection of one’s own undesirable qualities onto a child, and the subjective experience of loneliness, communication addiction. Using the analysis of differences, the study revealed that parents of children demonstrating a relatively low level of communication addiction, show tendencies for excessive requirements-duties, minimal sanctions, and a low level of educatory uncertainty.