Associations between household chaos and mental health in adolescents: The role of parent-adolescent relationship and adolescent resilience

There is a growing concern about the detrimental impact of living in a chaotic home on adolescent development. Although household chaos (i.e., excessive noise, disorganization, lack of routines) is widely recognized as an important factor affecting adolescent mental health, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, particularly when examining positive (e.g., flourishing) and negative indicators (e.g., depressive symptoms) together. Our study aims to provide insights into the relationship between household chaos and adolescent mental health by examining the mediating effects of father/mother-adolescent relationship and the moderating effect of adolescent resilience, from both concurrent and longitudinal perspective. We utilized a two-wave sample of 603 adolescents (Mage at Time 1 = 13.52 ± 0.35 years; 50.7 % girls) from two-parent households in China, with data collected at a one-year interval. We found that household chaos was associated with adolescent depressive symptoms and flourishing through distinct pathways: (1) In concurrent analyses, mother-adolescent conflict and father-adolescent intimacy mediated the concurrent association between household chaos and depressive symptoms, while both mother-adolescent and father-adolescent intimacy mediated the association between household chaos and flourishing; (2) In longitudinal analyses, mother-adolescent conflict mediated the associations between household chaos and both depressive symptoms and flourishing; and (3) Adolescent resilience moderated the concurrent association between mother-adolescent intimacy and depressive symptoms. These findings emphasize the importance of reducing household chaos and highlighting potential targets in interventions within family settings.