Bidirectional Relationship Between Family and School Interpersonal Relationships and Internalizing Problems Among Chinese High School Students.

Although adolescents' interpersonal relationships and internalizing problems may shape one another over time, previous work has rarely considered multiple family and school relationships together while testing whether broad prospective associations also reflect changes within adolescents over time. This study investigated bidirectional associations between internalizing problems and adolescents' relationships with mothers, fathers, teachers, and peers. The sample comprised 3,837 Grade 10 students from two Chinese high schools (Mage = 15.40 years, SD = 0.61; 52% female at baseline) who were assessed annually across three waves. A traditional cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) showed broad prospective associations, with internalizing problems predicting poorer subsequent relationship quality across all four domains and mother-child, father-child, and teacher-student relationship quality predicting lower subsequent internalizing problems. A random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) showed negative between-person associations across domains, whereas reciprocal within-person associations emerged only between teacher-student relationship quality and internalizing problems. These findings indicate that reciprocal processes in adolescent adjustment vary across relational contexts and levels of analysis, highlighting teacher-student relationships as an important school-based context for adolescent mental health.