How do our daily actions make the people we care about most feel loved? Surely, they know we love them, right? After 16 years of experiencing being raised, does a teenager vary in how much they feel loved by a parent each day? We love our kids and put tons of time, energy, blood, sweat, money, and more into raising them. They should feel loved, right? Well, yes, but it is more complicated when we look at it from one day to the next.

Parenting teenagers is often a balancing act that inevitably involves conflict. However, parents might be getting caught up on the wrong things.

Love, like all emotions, should vary from one time to another. In a recent study, we recruited teenagers and one of their parents (or caregivers) who lived together to find out more. First, we had teenagers tell us how close they felt to that parent in the study. Then, every evening for three weeks, teenagers and those parents completed a short survey.

Each day, we asked teenagers how much they felt loved by the parent participating in........

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