Co-authored by Sheri McVay and Jonathan Santo
Who matters more to teenagers, their friends or their parents? When it comes to adolescents, most of us assume friends matter more than parents, and that answer seems obvious. Adolescence is often described as the period when peers take center stage and parents gradually fade into the background. Friends become the primary source of validation and emotional support, and although parents remain involved, they may seem less influential.
This narrative isn’t wrong. But it’s incomplete and in some cultural contexts, it may be even misleading. For this reason, our research team wanted to examine whether peer support or parental support matters more when African adolescents experience stressors like bullying.
We analyzed data from more than 2,500 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17 from Benin in West Africa. The data came from the World Health Organization’s Global School-Based Health Survey, and aimed to assess adolescents’ health risk behaviors and protective factors in low- and middle-income countries using self-reported questionnaires.
As expected, adolescents who were bullied were more vulnerable to mental health issues, such as feeling lonely and even considering suicide. What surprised us, however, was where support mattered most. We expected that support from friends would explain the link between being bullied and vulnerability to mental health issues, but it did not. Instead, parental support emerged as an important protective factor. Adolescents who felt more supported by their parents reported fewer mental health problems, even when they had experienced bullying.
The Western View of Adolescence
Most of what we know about adolescent development comes from research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. In these contexts, autonomy and independence are highly valued, and adolescence is framed as a time of emotional separation from parents and increased reliance on peers.
This perspective has shaped how psychologists, educators, and policymakers think about youth mental health. Anti-bullying programs often focus on peer relationships, encouraging friendship-building, peer mentoring, and social skills, while family involvement is treated as secondary.
Rethinking Intervention Efforts
Our findings do not suggest that peers don’t matter. Rather, they highlight a critical limitation of one-size-fits-all approaches to adolescent mental health. Our results challenge the idea that parents naturally become less important during adolescence. Instead, it suggests that parents’ roles depend heavily on cultural context. As in many African societies, Benin places strong emphasis on collectivist and family-centered values. Within such contexts, adolescents’ emotional well-being and behavioral regulation are often more strongly shaped by parental involvement than by peer relationships. This has important implications for bullying intervention efforts, suggesting that strategies focused solely on peer dynamics may be insufficient. Interventions that actively engage parents and families, reinforcing communication, supervision, and emotional support, may be particularly effective in reducing the psychological consequences of bullying.
For parents: Your role does not disappear during adolescence, even if your teenager seems withdrawn or peer-focused. Emotional availability, warmth, and consistent presence can be profoundly protective, especially when your teen is struggling socially.
For educators and schools: Anti-bullying efforts should extend beyond peers and schools. Programs that involve families and strengthen parent-adolescent relationships may be more effective than peer-only approaches, particularly in diverse cultural settings.