Adolescent-Dog Relationship Quality and Coping With Peer Stress

Adolescence is a developmental period involving social and peer transitions, and within this context peer stress can contribute to social anxiety. Fostering adaptive coping strategies for youth to effectively manage this peer stress is crucial for developing resilience. Relationships with pet dogs may be one way of supporting effective coping through social support and physiological regulation. However, the specific nuances of youth-dog relationship quality have not been explored in the context of social anxiety.

We analyzed survey data collected in the United States from 514 adolescents with high social anxiety (ages 13-17; 62.1% cisgender girl, 32.4% cisgender boy, 2.8% nonbinary or genderqueer, 1.6% transgender) and their parents. Participants were recruited through national panel sampling and local community outreach. Structural equation modeling was used to examine if and how adolescent-dog relationship qualities were associated with dimensions of coping with peer stress.

Relationship qualities of Companionship, Nurturance, and Friction were linked to adaptive and maladaptive coping in the expected directions. Counter to our hypotheses, higher frequency of engaging with dogs for emotional support was negatively associated with adaptive coping and positively associated with maladaptive coping strategies. Affection was not significantly associated with coping, and Pets as Substitutes for People followed similar trends to Friction (negatively associated with adaptive coping).

These findings suggest that relationship quality is an important dimension in understanding how pet dogs can support adolescent resilience. This points to the need for future research to explore the role of contextual factors in shaping beneficial adolescent-dog relationships.