Adolescent Relationship Navigation for Vietnamese 14–19: Peer, Romantic, and Family-Conflict Domains and a Domain-Calibrated Operational Practice Set

The Vietnamese 14–19 cohort navigates three relational domains simultaneously — peer (friendship, peer hierarchy, social comparison, bullying), romantic (early dating, attraction, sexuality, relationship-end), and family conflict (autonomy negotiation, parental pressure, post-major-decision divergence) — with cultural scripts that systematically under-resource each domain. Peer life is read as either pure resource (the bạn cùng tiến frame) or pure risk (the bạn xấu frame), with the empirical pattern in between unmodelled; romantic life is treated as developmental noise to be deferred until after university (yêu sớm as moral failing), with the consequence that healthy-versus-controlling-relationship discrimination, sexuality and consent literacy, and breakup recovery have no operational scaffolding; family conflict is encoded as filial failure (hỗn, bất hiếu) when the same conflict in Western individualist framings is read as developmentally normative autonomy work. This paper synthesises the adolescent peer-relations literature [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], the adolescent romantic-relations literature [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], the bullying and online-harassment literature [12], [13], [14], [15], the family-autonomy literature [16], [17], [18], [19], and the cross-cultural anchor [20], [21], [22], [23], [24] into a three-domain × research-grounded-pattern × Vietnamese-context-pattern × cultural-reframing matrix. The substantive contribution is a domain-calibrated operational practice set: peer-domain practices (friendship-quality assessment, peer-comparison resistance, bullying response, online-versusoffline calibration), romantic-domain practices (relationship readiness, healthy-versus-controlling discrimination, breakup recovery, evidence-based age-appropriate sexuality and consent, safety), family-conflict-domain practices (autonomy negotiation scripts, parental-pressure response, sibling dynamics, post-majordecision divergence). Three load-bearing reframings discipline the work. (1) The con nhà người ta social-comparison pattern is recognised as a peer-domain stressor that interacts with the peer-hierarchy and social-brain literatures, not a private family rhetoric; the operational counter is dimension-reattribution (carried from I3.3) plus comparison-target diversification, not denial of comparison. (2) Romantic relationships are not pre-emptively pathologised; the operational frame is readiness, healthy-relationship literacy, and exit competence, not deferral. (3) Family conflict during 14–19 is operationally normative and does not signal filial failure; the I3.3 cultural-resource versus cultural-risk decomposition supplies the negotiation grammar without dismissing filial concern. Sexuality, consent, and safety