A 10-year longitudinal study suggests that when seeking a confidante, many children are more likely to turn to their pets than to their siblings or other peers.

After working on a data set with Professor Claire Hughes of Cambridge, Matt Cassels was struck by the data on children’s relationships with pets and decided to focus his MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology on these relationships, according to gatescambridge.org.

“It had never occurred to me to consider looking at pet relationships although I had studied children’s other relationships for some time and even though my own experience of pets while I was growing up was so important,” Cassels said.His study tracked the ways in which children from 100 families developed emotionally and socially. These children differed in many ways, such as socioeconomic status and other components of their families and home lives, but all were two years old when the study began and participated in the study for the same 10-year period.

Most of the data used in Cassels’ research was that collected at the end of the study, when the participants were 12 years old. At this time, when 88 of the children had pets, Cassels collected information on each child’s social and emotional development and wellbeing from their families and teachers.

In order to compare this data to the relationship the children had with their pets, he adjusted a scale frequently used in psychological studies to measure human attachment, or the strength of the relationship between two people, so that it instead measured the strength of the relationship between a person and a pet. Data on how often a child confided in or argued with their pet, how much their relationship with their pet satisfied them and the amount of time they spent with their pet was all factored into this scale.

Cassels expected to find that the children who had the strongest relationships with their pets would also be the happiest children in the study, but the data he collected suggested that the connection might not be quite so simple: the children in the study who had stronger relationships with their pets than with other children were frequently those who had had to face some sort of obstacle elsewhere in their lives, such as divorce, family instability or financial struggles. These same children were also more prone to mental health issues and lower performance in school, although Cassels says this could be because their backgrounds predispose them to problems like these.

The research suggested that children who had strong relationships with their pets also tended to have high levels of “prosocial behavior” — activities such as sharing or helping others. The children who did these things were more likely to not only spend time with their pets, but to talk to and confide in them. Cassels believes this is because the children believe their pets are listening to what they confide.

Other studies suggest the social benefits that pets can have on children. One such study from the University of Missouri, which followed 70 families with autistic children, found that the children with dogs or other pets were more likely to do things such as introduce themselves or ask questions, social skills with which autistic children typically struggle.

“They may feel that their pets are not judging them and since pets don’t appear to have their own problems they just listen, “ he said. “Even confiding in a journal can be therapeutic, pets may be even better since they can be empathetic.”