The Role of Family Structure and Support in Promoting Adolescent Health and Well-Being

Dear Colleagues,

The family is of exceptional and lifelong importance to the physical and mental health, as well as the health behaviours, of children and adolescents. This is evident, for example, when considering the family structure, which has been linked to children’s and adolescents’ health and well-being; a nuclear family has been shown to be indicative of better health outcomes as compared with a single-parent family or a stepfamily. Family support is rarely included in studies on child and adolescent health and well-being, albeit findings have also indicated its importance. Even though family structure and support (e.g., a child's subjective feelings of closeness to parents) decrease from early childhood to late adolescence, family continues to play a key role in offspring development, and this role may be as important as it is in the early developmental stages, although different and less noticeable. These processes also depend on social and cultural circumstances. Thus, in order to understand better the impact of family environment factors on child and adolescent health and well-being, it is necessary to examine the family in the social and cultural context of each country. On the other hand, the family is a dynamic structure of society, so it is necessary to study it from the perspective of historical development. Thus, family studies, such as the study of family structure and support in child and adolescent health and well-being, are an inexhaustible and always relevant area of research.

For this Special Issue, we invite research articles that focus on the family as an integral entity of parents and children, considering the role of family structure and support or other familial factors in child and adolescent health, well-being, and health behaviour. Articles across a range of topics in the selected research area that employ various methods (such as cross-sectional or longitudinal studies, questionnaire surveys, time trend analyses, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses) are welcome. Studies selecting specific groups of subjects (preschoolers, school-age children, students, etc.) are especially encouraged, as are research articles that present the results of studies in the social, cultural, or historical context of the country.

We look forward to reading your submissions.

Prof. Dr. Apolinaras Zaborskis
Guest Editor

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• family
• parents
• children
• adolescents
• family structure
• parental support
• family climate
• health
• well-being
• quality of life
• health behaviour