“The Family Life Optimizing Well-Being (FLOW) study was designed to capture the day-to-day experiences of families with adolescents in their early high school years, and understand how these experiences shape their well-being and risk for mental health problems and/or substance use. Adolescence is a crucial developmental period where families undergo a lot of change, which we often think about in terms of months or years. This study considered day-to-day changes that parents and adolescents experience that serve as the foundation for their developmental changes.

Most developmental studies investigating adolescent well-being have focused on risk for mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, or behavior problems. The FLOW study focused on balancing these problem outcomes with positive well-being, such as flourishing, life satisfaction, happiness, meaning, and purpose in life.

The FLOW study is guided by family systems principles. In the PSU Family P.O.W.E.R. Lab, we consider how daily family experiences shape adolescent well-being, but also how parents benefit from positive relationships in the family.

To capture the families’ ebbs and flows in relationships, moods, and well-being, this study used a 21-day daily diary protocol where 150 adolescents and their caregivers completed the same survey every day, 21 days in a row. We measured one parent or caregiver and one adolescent in these families. Other aspects of the study focused on aspects family conflict, couple conflict between caregivers as well as family-level and parent adolescent conflict. We also did a follow-up survey one year later in order to understand the long-term implications of the day-to-day experiences in families with adolescents.

Our findings confirmed that families fluctuate a lot and in very meaningful ways. This has important implications for how we can better understand and help families. For example, an important finding from this study was that variability in the parent-adolescent relationship predicted how those adolescents were doing a year later. This work underscores the importance of not only having positive interactions with your child, but also to do so consistently from day to day. Effectively, we find that daily experiences accumulate to serve as building blocks for successful development.

The FLOW study has formed the basis of successful projects by several early career researchers with findings published in peer-reviewed journals.