Credit: cid.edson

It’s time to re-evaluate your relationship with your teenager because according to a new study, the parental relationship can influence adult children’s romantic relationships for up to 15 years! Of course, the study found that a positive relationship with one’s parents leads to adult children making healthier choices in a spouse.

Studies like these are important even if the results seem super obvious because:

Being aware of that connection may save a lot of heartache down the road, according to Johnson, who reviewed existing data that was gathered in the United States over a span of 15 years.

If you are having a contentious relationship with your teen, it’s important you have a conversation with him or her about how the difficult relationship could affect their love life and marriage:

“People tend to compartmentalize their relationships; they tend not to see the connection between one kind, such as family relations, and another, like couple unions. But understanding your contribution to the relationship with your parents would be important to recognizing any tendency to replicate behaviour — positive or negative — in an intimate relationship.”

Please check out the Love and Logic technique if you are having a problem with your teenager so that you can either prevent having a rocky relationship with your teen or fix an already troubled one. The effects of the troubled teen years last a bit longer than we thought so I really, really suggest that you check out Love and Logic or other parenting techniques that may be of help.

For more information on the study, “Don’t let rocky past relations with parents spoil your romance”, click here.