Affirming Homes Lift LGBTQ+ Youth, Two-Year Study Shows

Following the same young people for two years changes what a survey can say. The Trevor Project's Project SPARK study — a longitudinal project tracking 1,689 LGBTQ+ young people across the United States from September 2023 through March 2026 — has now published its two-year findings, and the clearest protective signal in the data is close to home. Affirming Homes and family support were linked to better mental health over time, even as anxiety and depression remained stubbornly high across the cohort.

The report, published October 20, covers five waves of surveys administered every six months. It builds on interim one-year findings by extending follow-up through a fifth round, with 1,217 participants answering the final survey. The sample was notably diverse: 68% of participants were youth of color, and about half were transgender, nonbinary or gender-questioning. Researchers measured a dozen distinct family-support actions — things like talking respectfully about LGBTQ+ identity or supporting a young person's gender expression — and found the average score sat near two on a four-point scale, barely moving across the study.

What did move was the home environment itself. Of those with enough data for the measure, 53% initially described their home as LGBTQ+-affirming. By the two-year follow-up, that figure had risen to 61%. In the study's longitudinal models, affirming home environments, family support, gender euphoria and access to some gender-affirming resources were all associated with better mental health outcomes over time — while victimization, discrimination, conversion therapy, economic insecurity and bathroom access barriers were associated with worse ones.

What family support actually looks like

The study's twelve-item measure is useful because it turns an abstract idea into concrete behavior. Participants were asked whether family members had done specific things: speaking about LGBTQ+ identity with respect, standing up for them, supporting how they express their gender. These are small, repeatable actions rather than grand gestures, and the report's qualitative material underscores how much young people notice their absence. One participant's request, quoted in coverage reported by Fridae, put it plainly: "I would like more motivational support from people around me especially from my family members."

The findings land alongside a difficult backdrop. Already-high rates of anxiety and depression observed at baseline increased after two years of follow-up, while suicidal ideation stayed consistently high. There was some encouraging movement: self-harm and suicide attempts decreased from baseline, helpline use increased, and friends remained the most common source of support during suicidal crises. But the gaps are stark. Nearly one-third of participants who experienced suicidal thoughts reported seeking help from no one at every assessment, and more than half reported discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity across the study period. Past-year houselessness increased between the one-year and two-year follow-ups, and unmet basic needs stayed high.

The barriers that did not budge

Getting care remained hard. Although most participants who wanted mental health care were receiving it by the two-year follow-up, they continued to report barriers including needing a parent or caregiver's permission, cost, fear of discussing mental health, fear of not being taken seriously and concern that providers would not understand their LGBTQ+ identities. Among transgender and nonbinary participants who wanted hormones, access increased substantially over time, and access to tools like clothing, binders or shapewear improved — yet many still reported bathroom access barriers and difficulty changing identification documents.

Online life offered mixed signals. From the one-year to the two-year follow-up, participants became slightly less comfortable using social media for identity disclosure and exploration, and used it a bit less to seek LGBTQ+-related information and connection. Cyberbullying scores were low at both time points, with slightly fewer LGBTQ+-related cyberbullying experiences reported at two years. Threats of or exposure to conversion therapy, meanwhile, continued to accumulate: reports of ever having experienced it increased from baseline through the two-year follow-up.

Read the caveats before the headlines

The researchers are upfront about what this study cannot prove. Participants signed up through paid online ads, so this was a self-selected cohort rather than a random sample of the United States population. Questions were in English, answers were confidential, and the symptom measures rely on people's own responses rather than clinical diagnoses. Some participants were lost to follow-up between the first and fifth waves. And the central finding is an association, not proof of causation: the data show that family support and better mental health moved together over time, not that one definitively caused the other.

Those limits matter, but they do not erase the pattern. Few studies follow this many LGBTQ+ young people this long, and the consistency of the protective signal across waves is the point. For parents and caregivers, the practical reading is direct: the behaviors the study measured are learnable — listen, speak respectfully about identity, support how your kid expresses themselves. For young people without that support at home, the report points to what helped elsewhere: friends were the most common lifeline in a crisis, and helpline use grew. The Trevor Project's trained crisis counselors are available around the clock, and anyone in the United States can call or text 988 to reach the national crisis lifeline.

Future waves of the study will keep following participants through adolescence and young adulthood, tracking whether Affirming Homes keep rising as they do — a period the researchers note coincides with significant social and political change for LGBTQ+ communities. For more on what support looks like in practice, see For Queer Teens, One Trusted Person Changes Everything, and on how belonging shapes teen mental health, see Teen Belonging May Shield Mental Health, New Survey Finds. On the sleep and mental-health connection, read Circadian Depression: Why Night Owls May Carry a Different Illness.

Sources: The Trevor Project's Project SPARK two-year findings; Fridae's coverage of the home-environment findings.