Annie Wilson is researching the role fathers could play in encouraging healthy mental development in adolescent boys.

Annie Wilson had a flourishing career in finance before she decided to pivot to psychology. Following the 2008 financial crisis, which marked a “significant turning point” in her life, Wilson returned to academia for her third degree – a bachelor’s in psychology. She had previously earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in business studies.

Wilson has committed fully to a career in psychology in recent years, and is currently working on her doctoral research into adolescent boys’ mental development with backing from the Craig Dobbin Doctoral Scholarship in Mental Health supported by UCD Foundation.

For me, research is the foundation upon which all credible psychological practice is built. Without it, clinical decisions would rest on intuition, tradition, or anecdote rather than evidence.

In child and adolescent psychology, particularly, research has been transformative. It has established early interventions which in turn produce better long-term outcomes, identifying risk and protective factors for mental health difficulties.

I have always wanted to work with children and adolescents. The recent movement in the online world has made me think about how this will play out in society as children grow into adulthood.

I came interested in the online world, and how what children and adolescents are consuming online is changing how they fundamentally engage with their peers.

As I started to look into this area, I was drawn to boys specifically. The literature is starting to provide evidence around the stark disconnect between boys’ online world and their emotional wellbeing.

I became curious about what the landscape would like in 10 years’ time for adolescent boys now and how what they view now will change their fundamental behaviours and beliefs. It started to raise urgent questions about identity formation, mental health and help-seeking behaviour.

Given boys already underutilise mental health services, and manosphere narratives that frame vulnerability as weakness, I wondered about long term interventions – and could relational relationships move the needle?

After many conversations with my supervisors and my research studies panel, Gordon Harold, Brian O’Donohue and Marina Everri, it led me to think about where are the fathers in this equation. Could they be part of the solution?

This developed my research question for my scoping review, which is: what is known in the existing literature about the relationship between father-son attachment and sons’ digital behaviour, the mediating effect of emotional regulation, and what gaps exist in understanding this relationship as a basis for developing a targeted relational intervention?

I believe it is fundamental to how relationships will develop in the coming years. We could be moving away from a more equitable experience for both men and women in western society.

As per the CyberSafeKids research conducted in 2024, 99pc of children aged 12-14 have their own smart device. 38pc have experienced cyber bulling. 61pc have unrestricted access.

There are many facets to this, social comparison. Exposure to idealised images [has been] linked to body dissatisfaction and depressive symptoms. Teachers are concerned about the harmful and toxic content in student feeds.

We need to start to look at long-term solutions to problematic social media use. As we wait to see how countries like Australia get on with the social media ban, we need to look for other solutions.

It will not reset with one intervention; we need a myriad of approaches to tackle the change that we are experiencing in adolescent boys’ content consumption and their norms. I wonder does the relational relationship hold the key to this need?

At present, I cannot see if there is a commercial application to the current research. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t have real-world value.

I can see it playing a meaningful role in shaping how we design digital literacy programmes, the kind that help young people, and particularly boys, develop a healthier relationship with technology.

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the research points toward something more thoughtful – building skills gradually, layer by layer, in a way that actually sticks.

That kind of evidence-based framework could be genuinely useful to schools, parenting organisations, or anyone developing resources in this space.

There are many challenges in this area, gaining a true reflection around how much adolescent boys’ behaviour has changed, understanding in real time the consumption of TikToks, reels, pornographic images and videos, and how that will shape their future relationships and how they present in the world as an adult.

It is nuanced, and we are researching children and their parental attachment with their fathers. It will be difficult to gain quantitative research; I will be leaning more on qualitative findings through interviews and focus groups. We need to ensure we safe-guard everyone who participates in the research so that they feel heard and understood.

There are many common misconceptions in the father-son attachment research. The two main ones are that fathers play a peripheral role in the adolescent development. This is a myth.

Research consistently contradicts this – paternal involvement is independently associated with better mental health outcomes, stronger emotional regulation, and reduced risk-taking behaviour in adolescent boys, over and above maternal influence.

Another misconception is that boys do not need emotional connection with their fathers. Cultural narratives around masculinity suggest boys need discipline and challenge from fathers rather than emotional closeness.

In reality, adolescent boys with emotionally available fathers demonstrate greater psychological resilience, better peer relationships, and are significantly more likely to seek help when struggling.

We are looking at fathers’ and sons’ attachment, and investigating if modelling around rupture and repair can aid in emotion regulation, and could possibly safe-guard boys from problematic social media use.

We want to develop an intervention that puts fathers and sons at the heart of the process, and develop a relational intervention that is a sustained and a grounded framework for fathers to utilise.

Looking ahead, we’d love to see research that really reaches people, in the places where families actually live their lives: schools, community groups and youth services.

One area we’re particularly passionate about is finding better ways to support boys and their fathers in navigating the digital world. Screen time and online culture are shaping how young men think, behave and relate to others, and we don’t yet have enough practical, real-world tools to address that.

We’d like to explore how father-son programmes could be woven into existing settings, whether that’s a school, a local sports club, or mental health services like CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services), and so that support is available to families who need it most without requiring a whole new system to be built from scratch.

That kind of joined-up, scalable approach feels especially important in a country like Ireland, where mental health resources are already stretched thin.

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