There is a lot of discussion about the effects that peers and parents have on teens, especially when it comes to negative outcomes like substance use and delinquency.  The notion of “peer pressure” has become particularly popular, and while it is useful to consider the influence of friends and social life it’s been difficult to specifically pin down how this might work.  A study calls attention to the importance of social stability for young people’s health by connecting frequent relocation to clinical depression and suicide.

Researchers used medical records of over 4,000 young people who had attempted suicide and found that adolescents between 11 and 17 who had moved 3-5 times were about twice as likely to attempt suicide as those who had not moved at all.  While it is impossible to disentangle the effects of social instability, poverty, and parental relationships in this study (which could conceivably all contribute), it does highlight the importance of having a stable set of relationships between a young person and his or her social environment. It isn’t very hard to imagine that a teen who has to establish relationships in new schools and neighborhoods over and over might never fully build long lasting bonds with others, bonds that help them cope with stress, provide opportunities for achievement, give a sense of belonging, and other important social rewards. 

Without a stable social environment youth would have a particularly difficult time maintaining a social identity and an understanding of how to navigate the social world.  Identity and culture support individuals’ attainment of these rewards by providing avenues to establish friendships, friend groups, and draw youth into organized activities and social institutions.  If a teen is simply not in one place long enough to forge these bonds or if he or she is abruptly removed from them at once then this support could be lost.  Clearly parental relationships and resources could also play a part since it is the parents who are choosing or being forced to reloate, and this could make adjustment to a new place that much more emotionally difficult. 

This finding suggests to those interested in studying adolescents and understanding what may lead to negative outcomes in youth that it is incomplete to simply reduce social influences to one or two variables.  For example, asking young people things like if they have been offered alcohol or drugs or if their parents are divorced represent only one small part of the puzzle.  It appears that these processes are more complicated and individuals are better understood as not self-contained but embedded in social environments that influence a constellation of outcomes.  Depression, substance use, delinquency, and poor academic performance often appear together.  In order to better understand why this might be, we need to consider what might underlie them all, and having a stable social environment during adolescence may be one big factor that effects many others. 

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