What we bring to the table: New study explores how relationships are shaped by both mentors and mentees

Cory, M., Rice, J., Chavis, C., Carter, J., Sanchez, B., Michel, R., DuBois, D. L., Chen, E., & Grant, K. (2025). What we bring to the table: An examination of the developing relationship between youth mentees and their college mentors. Journal of Community Psychology, 53(8), e70044. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.70044

Introduction

Youth mentoring research has focused overwhelmingly on how mentors affect mentees, largely treating the mentor as a fixed, stable presence rather than a person with their own psychological needs and social circumstances. Cory and colleagues (2025) push back against this one-sided framing, arguing that mentoring is fundamentally a dyadic relationship in which both people bring strengths, vulnerabilities, and environmental pressures into the match. The authors apply Lewin’s (1951) person-environment fit theory, which frames mentoring relationships as shaped by both parties’ individual characteristics and environments, not just the mentor’s capacity to help.

Methods

The study drew on data from the Cities Mentor Project, an after-school mentoring program operating in three Chicago public elementary schools between 2016 and 2020. Participants included 80 undergraduate mentors (mean age 19.83, 76.3% female, 52.5% White) from a private university and 80 elementary and middle school mentees (mean age 10.61, 91.3% Black or African American, 53.8% female) attending schools serving predominantly low-income communities. Mentors and mentees were matched by a program director based on interviews assessing shared interests and needs, then met weekly for structured one-on-one and group sessions over a full academic year, following a modified trauma-informed curriculum. Both mentors and mentees completed surveys at baseline and at three, six, and nine months, measuring perceived mentoring relationship quality (using shortened versions of the Match Characteristics Questionnaire and Youth Mentoring Survey), social support from important adults at home and school, and, for mentors only, internalizing symptoms such as anxiety and depression (measured using the Behavior Assessment System for Children’s Internalizing Problems composite). Researchers used cross-lagged panel models for mentee data and multiple regression for mentors, given smaller mentor sample sizes at later waves. An actor-partner interdependence model tested dyadic effects between matched pairs.

Results

For mentees, stronger social supports at baseline predicted better perceptions of the mentoring relationship at three months (Cory et al., 2025). Mentors who reported higher internalizing symptoms, meaning greater anxiety, depression, and related difficulties, at the start of the program rated the mentoring relationship significantly more negatively three months in. For mentees, stronger social supports at baseline predicted better perceptions of the mentoring relationship at three months, while mentors entering the relationship with higher internalizing symptoms rated the mentoring relationship more negatively at three months, regardless of their social support levels. Mentor mental health, not mentor social connectedness, was what mattered for relationship quality.

Discussion

These findings complicate the traditional picture of youth mentoring, in which the mentor is cast as a stable, giving adult and the mentee as the beneficiary of the relationship’s ups and downs. The authors argue that college mentors, many of whom are navigating their own developmental transition into early adulthood, complete with new academic demands, shifting social networks, and, increasingly, undiagnosed or untreated mental health struggles, enter these relationships as full participants whose internal states shape relationship quality just as much as any mentee characteristic does. This finding echoes earlier work by Lindquist and Raposa (2020), who similarly linked mentor depressive symptoms to negative perceptions of the mentoring relationship and to relational avoidance. The authors highlight this as evidence that mentoring programs, particularly those partnering with universities, need to consider with the psychological realities of their mentors. College mentors carry their own vulnerabilities into these relationships, and those vulnerabilities shape relationship outcomes just as mentee characteristics do.

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Mentors deserve to be treated as intervention recipients in their own right, not just service providers. Programs affiliated with universities have the advantage that they can embed mental health screening, ongoing check-ins, and targeted support directly into required training courses or supervision meetings,. Given that internalizing symptoms, not social support levels, were what predicted a mentor’s negative view of the relationship, programs may want to prioritize mental health screening and referral pathways for incoming mentors over general efforts to widen their social networks. This means screening for mentor mental health needs, building in ongoing psychological support alongside training, and creating structures that let mentors process their own struggles rather than assuming they arrive ready to give without needing anything themselves.

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