Early Predictors of Healthy Adult Relationships: Mapping Longitudinal Evidence, Gaps, and Pathways to Intervention and Policy

The quality of a person’s close relationships is among the most reliable predictors of lifelong health, well-being, and longevity that developmental science has produced (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023; Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010). Yet healthy adult relationships—construed broadly to include romantic partnerships, friendships, family ties, and community belonging—are more often invoked as an outcome than studied as a developmental achievement with identifiable origins. This Research Topic treats healthy adult relational quality as a lifespan outcome with early roots, and asks what longitudinal evidence reveals about the experiences, capacities, and contexts that, beginning before adulthood, forecast the ability to form and sustain healthy relationships in adulthood.

We are interested in conceptual and empirical research that advances understanding of the developmental pathways that link predictors in childhood and/or adolescence to healthy adult relationship outcomes. Conceptual articles might interrogate how “healthy” relationships are defined and operationalized or examine the alignment between the early predictors scholars typically measure and the adult outcomes they hope to explain. Empirical articles might draw on prospective longitudinal data—from infancy, childhood, or adolescence into adulthood—to test which early experiences and capacities forecast later relational health, and through what mediating mechanisms. Collectively, the Research Topic aims to map what longitudinal research has established, identify the critical gaps that currently limit cumulative progress, and explore how the research, intervention, and policy agendas can be moved forward together in meaningful ways.

For this Research Topic, we welcome contributions from across developmental science, family science, prevention and intervention science, education, public health, sociology, economics, and neuroscience, and from scholarship grounded in diverse methodological and epistemological traditions. We construe early predictors broadly to include caregiving and attachment, family processes, neighborhood and economic conditions, peer and friendship competence, adolescent romantic experience, self-regulation, and social-emotional skill, as well as the proximal and distal contexts—families, schools, programs, communities, policy, and increasingly digital and AI-mediated environments—within which relational capacities develop. We likewise construe relational health broadly and positively, beyond the mere absence of conflict or dissolution. A key contribution of the Research Topic will be conceptual and empirical alignment between the early predictor under study and the adult relational outcome it is theorized to shape, alongside sustained attention to mechanism, measurement, equity, and the translation of predictive evidence into intervention and policy.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Prospective pathways from early caregiving, attachment, or self-regulation to multidimensional adult relational health
• Defining and measuring relational health (e.g., positively framed, multidimensional outcome definitions and measures suitable for longitudinal use)
• Mediating mechanisms that carry early predictors into adult outcomes (e.g., emotion regulation, mentalization, conflict repair, narrative coherence)
• Adolescent peer, friendship, and romantic experience as precursors of adult relationship quality, including off-time or atypical trajectories
• Risk, resilience, and protective moderators in the wake of early adversity or maltreatment
• Family processes and the intergenerational transmission of relational patterns
• Long-term follow-ups of social-emotional learning and relationship-education interventions, including null and mixed results
• Predictor-to-intervention translation (e.g., whether modifying an identified early predictor shifts downstream relational outcomes)
• Methodological and measurement innovations (e.g., cross-cohort data harmonization, person-centered or causal-inference approaches, reducing retrospective-recall and self-report bias)
• Equity and generalizability across culture, family structure, sexuality, and socioeconomic context
• Technology- and AI-mediated relating as an emerging early predictor and developmental context
• Policy implications of early-predictor research for education, prevention, and family policy.

We welcome Original Research, Review, Systematic Review, Mini Reviews, Hypothesis and Theory, Brief Research Report, Conceptual Analysis, Perspective, and Policy Brief submissions.

Submissions focused on adolescent-period predictors (peer and romantic experience, adolescent self-regulation, family processes during adolescence) fit best under Adolescent Psychological Development. Submissions with a primary focus on social or emotional mechanisms that carry an early predictor into adult relational health (emotion regulation, mentalization, attachment processes spanning multiple periods) fit well under Social and Emotional Development. Submissions examining infancy-era predictors (prenatal bonding, early caregiving, attachment formation in the first 36 months) as the starting point of the developmental pathway fit well under the Development in Infancy section. Authors are welcome to submit to whichever section best matches their study’s primary developmental focus. All submissions will be handled within this single Research Topic regardless of section.

While we welcome interdisciplinary contributions, all submissions must maintain a clear developmental or psychological science framing, situating findings within the study of relational development and its underlying psychological processes. Submissions whose primary contribution is economic, sociological, or clinical in nature, without a substantive link to developmental or psychological mechanisms, should be directed to a specialized journal in the appropriate field.

If you did not receive an official call for participation from the Topic Editors but wish to submit, you are welcome to do so; however, please contact us at developmentalpsychology@frontiersin.org before submitting.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Lifespan development, relational health, developmental pathways, longitudinal research, caregiving and attachment, self-regulation, adolescent peer relationships, resilience, intergenerational transmission, intervention translation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.