Original title: Associations between adverse childhood experiences, parent-child and peer attachment relationships, and daily-life self-harm in adolescents
Julie Janssens, Ginette Lafit, Eva De Corte, Robin Achterhof +4 · September 2026
Bad childhood experiences, known as ACEs, can raise the risk of self-harm. Researchers wanted to know how these early hardships affect both thoughts and acts of self-harm in daily life, and if good relationships can help protect teenagers. They tracked teenagers with surveys and phone check-ins ten times a day for six days. They found that having more early hardships made teenagers more likely to experience lifetime self-harm and daily self-harm thoughts and actions. However, these hardships did not change how intense the thoughts felt once they started. A strong bond with a mother helped weaken the tie between early hardships and lifetime self-harm, as well as the daily intensity of those thoughts. Bonds with fathers or peers did not help in this way. Finally, sexual victimization had the most consistent ties to both lifetime and daily self-harm.
You come home with a scraped knee after falling off your bike. One parent kneels down and helps you clean it, while the other just says you'll be fine, and the sting feels much sharper when you're left alone. The fall still happened either way, and the knee still hurts, but the gentle cleanup makes the pain easier to carry. In this paper, childhood adversity is the fall, a close bond with their mother is the parent who helps clean the wound, and thoughts of hurting themselves are the pain, so a close bond does not stop those thoughts from appearing but can make them less intense.
Teen self-harm is frightening for families and clinicians. Knowing that a warm maternal relationship can soften the impact of childhood adversity points to a concrete place to focus support. It also shows that self-harm thoughts and behaviours behave differently, so prevention and treatment may need different targets.
The abstract doesn't say. It does note that analyses of specific ACE types were exploratory, and conclusions are framed as 'consistent with' rather than causal. The study uses retrospective self-report and a general-population sample from one region, so causality and generalizability are not established.
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Associations between adverse childhood experiences, parent-child and peer attachment relationships, and daily-life self-harm in adolescents — Julie Janssens, Ginette Lafit, Eva De Corte et al. — PsyArXiv — doi:10.31234/osf.io/bt58k_v4
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.