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From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship

Adolescence is a prime developmental period to explore human–pet relationships, particularly given that teens are often relying less on their families, and more on other attachment figures such as peers and pets. However, most research on pet companionship is conducted with adults and young children...

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Autores principales: Charmaraman, Linda, Cobas, Stephanie, Weed, Jules, Gu, Quan, Kiel, Elizabeth, Chin, Holly, Gramajo, Alyssa, Mueller, Megan K.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9137762/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35621440
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs12050143
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author Charmaraman, Linda
Cobas, Stephanie
Weed, Jules
Gu, Quan
Kiel, Elizabeth
Chin, Holly
Gramajo, Alyssa
Mueller, Megan K.
author_facet Charmaraman, Linda
Cobas, Stephanie
Weed, Jules
Gu, Quan
Kiel, Elizabeth
Chin, Holly
Gramajo, Alyssa
Mueller, Megan K.
author_sort Charmaraman, Linda
collection PubMed
description Adolescence is a prime developmental period to explore human–pet relationships, particularly given that teens are often relying less on their families, and more on other attachment figures such as peers and pets. However, most research on pet companionship is conducted with adults and young children. Moreover, lived experiences around having pets in households with adolescents are underexplored, particularly from parents’ perspectives. This qualitative interview study of 31 parents/guardians in the Northeast U.S. explored perceptions of the benefits and challenges of having pets for their adolescent’s well-being as well as how adolescents affected their pet’s well-being. Our three main themes for perceived benefits of pets included social (e.g., reducing anxiety), physical (e.g., screen time companionship), and emotional (e.g., regulation of difficult emotions such as anger, loneliness). Challenges to adolescent well-being included such social topics as family tension around unevenly shared responsibilities, physical themes such as problematic animal behaviors, and emotional themes related to grieving the passing of pets. We offer a developmental systems approach to understanding pets within adolescent families, noting future directions for developing family interventions to improve pet–adolescent interactions given the demands of child and pet upbringing during adolescence.
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spelling pubmed-91377622022-05-28 From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship Charmaraman, Linda Cobas, Stephanie Weed, Jules Gu, Quan Kiel, Elizabeth Chin, Holly Gramajo, Alyssa Mueller, Megan K. Behav Sci (Basel) Article Adolescence is a prime developmental period to explore human–pet relationships, particularly given that teens are often relying less on their families, and more on other attachment figures such as peers and pets. However, most research on pet companionship is conducted with adults and young children. Moreover, lived experiences around having pets in households with adolescents are underexplored, particularly from parents’ perspectives. This qualitative interview study of 31 parents/guardians in the Northeast U.S. explored perceptions of the benefits and challenges of having pets for their adolescent’s well-being as well as how adolescents affected their pet’s well-being. Our three main themes for perceived benefits of pets included social (e.g., reducing anxiety), physical (e.g., screen time companionship), and emotional (e.g., regulation of difficult emotions such as anger, loneliness). Challenges to adolescent well-being included such social topics as family tension around unevenly shared responsibilities, physical themes such as problematic animal behaviors, and emotional themes related to grieving the passing of pets. We offer a developmental systems approach to understanding pets within adolescent families, noting future directions for developing family interventions to improve pet–adolescent interactions given the demands of child and pet upbringing during adolescence. MDPI 2022-05-13 /pmc/articles/PMC9137762/ /pubmed/35621440 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs12050143 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Charmaraman, Linda
Cobas, Stephanie
Weed, Jules
Gu, Quan
Kiel, Elizabeth
Chin, Holly
Gramajo, Alyssa
Mueller, Megan K.
From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title_full From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title_fullStr From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title_full_unstemmed From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title_short From Regulating Emotions to Less Lonely Screen Time: Parents’ Qualitative Perspectives of the Benefits and Challenges of Adolescent Pet Companionship
title_sort from regulating emotions to less lonely screen time: parents’ qualitative perspectives of the benefits and challenges of adolescent pet companionship
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9137762/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35621440
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs12050143
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