The Secret to Great Relationships Starts in Childhood

Think about your closest relationships today — the friends you confide in, the family you lean on, the people who make you feel understood. Where did the ability to form those bonds come from? A massive new study of over 200,000 people across 22 countries looked back to childhood to find out.

A warm, supportive childhood sets us up for social success, while a painful one casts a long and lasting shadow.

Researchers asked adults about their early life experiences — things like how close they felt to their parents, whether they experienced abuse, how their family's finances were, how healthy they were, and whether they attended religious services. Then they compared those answers to how satisfied people felt with their relationships today. The results were striking. People who had good relationships with their mother and father growing up tended to rate their adult relationships higher.

So did people who grew up in better financial circumstances and who were healthier as kids. Attending religious services in childhood was also tied to better relationship quality later in life. On the flip side, two childhood experiences stood out for their negative connection to adult relationships. People who experienced abuse as children reported lower relationship quality as adults. And people who felt like an outsider in their own family while growing up also reported lower relationship quality — an effect nearly as large as abuse itself.

Women and older adults tended to report higher relationship quality. The patterns held across many countries, though the strength of the connections varied from place to place, suggesting that culture plays a role in how childhood experiences translate into adult social lives. The study can't prove that childhood experiences cause adult relationship quality — it describes patterns. But those patterns are remarkably consistent across the globe.