Abstract
Youth-adult relationships are fundamental to adolescent development, yet they exist within complex ecological systems shaped by adversity, systemic inequality, and societal disconnection. This three-paper dissertation investigates the nature and impact of youth-adult relationships across multiple contexts, mentoring, family, and school, with particular attention to youth with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Paper 1 proposes a theoretical ecological model that distinguishes adversity exposure from trauma symptoms and illustrates how perceived social support operates bidirectionally, both as a buffer against adversity and as an outcome shaped by it. Paper 2 presents quantitative findings demonstrating that ACEs are negatively associated with developmental relationships across all adult and peer relationship types. However, school-level factors, including teacher relationships and school engagement, slightly moderated this association. Paper 3 uses qualitative interviews with educators to examine how student adversity manifests in classrooms, burdens teachers' emotional well-being, and strains the very student-teacher relationships identified as protective in Paper 2. Together, these studies reveal that the protective capacity of youth-adult relationships is dynamic rather than static, shaped by cascading effects across micro-, meso-, and macrosystem levels. The findings call for multilevel interventions that simultaneously address student needs, educator well-being, and the systemic structures, such as funding, staffing, and training, that enable meaningful youth-adult connections to form and endure.
