Does Your Kid Feel Loved by You?

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How do our daily actions make the people we care about most feel loved? Surely, they know we love them, right? After 16 years of experiencing being raised, does a teenager vary in how much they feel loved by a parent each day? We love our kids and put tons of time, energy, blood, sweat, money, and more into raising them. They should feel loved, right? Well, yes, but it is more complicated when we look at it from one day to the next.

Parenting teenagers is often a balancing act that inevitably involves conflict. However, parents might be getting caught up on the wrong things.

Conflicts with children happen.

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Feeling Loved Can Vary

Love, like all emotions, should vary from one time to another. In a recent study, we recruited teenagers and one of their parents (or caregivers) who lived together to find out more. First, we had teenagers tell us how close they felt to that parent in the study. Then, every evening for three weeks, teenagers and those parents completed a short survey.

Each day, we asked teenagers how much they felt loved by the parent participating in the study, using a sliding scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most loved.

Teenagers did vary in how much they felt loved each day, but most felt high levels of love. In short, teenagers usually felt loved (the average was 8.37 out of 10), but the number did fluctuate a good amount, so we wanted to know why. Also, teenagers who were closer to their parents reported feeling more loved, but even these teenagers had a lot of variability.

In the parents' daily surveys, we asked them how much warmth they showed that day (e.g., affection, praise, understanding) and how much conflict (e.g., anger at the teen, tension) they had with the teenagers.

The Relationship Between Warmth and Feeling Loved

As you can guess, we expected warmth would increase when teenagers felt loved and conflict would reduce it. Our findings weren’t quite that simple when we looked at both of these factors together, but parents have really appreciated what we learned.

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Most importantly, we found that conflict did not matter for how loved teenagers felt as long as warmth was high on that day. This was true no matter how close teenagers were to their parents. In other words, for parents who showed warmth on days with high conflict, the teenagers felt essentially the same high amounts of love as on days with little or no conflict. However, teenagers did feel less loved if there was less warmth on days high in conflict.

Big point: Teenagers care much more about daily warmth than conflict. Without the warmth, they feel less loved.

As a parent, it can be easy to dwell on the negative conflict. Conflicts with our kids are upsetting and challenging, but our findings tell us that, no matter how big the conflict, warmth is what the teens are focused on.

An important point is that the warmth did not have to come during the conflict. We just asked if the parents showed warmth on that day that had conflict. Thus, if you do experience conflict, it will help your teen feel loved to have some warmth after the conflict has passed.

We didn’t test why this is so, but it is likely that by the time they are teenagers, children know and expect there will be conflict with parents. Toddlers have conflicts about what to eat, what color their plates are, and so on. As children get older, conflicts continue but shift (e.g., when is bedtime, how much screen time). Many times, children are intentionally initiating these conflicts. Thus, you cannot prevent all conflicts, and shouldn’t. Setting boundaries is important and healthy. Preventing dangerous behaviors is good, even if this makes our children mad. Teenagers are telling us they want warmth even if there is conflict, so as parents, we can fret less about the conflicts. Although we haven’t tested this in other relationships (e.g., romantic), we think there would be a similar pattern.