Adult attachment styles and mothers' relationships with their young children

Abstract

This research examined the relationship between adult attachment styles and mothers' feelings of closeness to their children, mothers' interaction styles in a teaching situation, individual differences in the desire to have children, and the concerns individuals have about their ability to relate to young children as parents. Investigation 1 revealed that more avoidant mothers did not feel as close to their preschool children as did more secure mothers, and they behaved less supportively toward their children during a laboratory teaching task. Anxious‐ambivalence was also associated with feelings of less closeness, but the level of closeness achieved depended on marital quality. Investigation 2 showed that more avoidant college men and women, compared to secure ones, were more uncertain about their capacity to relate to young children and about whether they wanted to have children. Highly ambivalent men and women reported being more uncertain about their capacity to function well as parents, but ambivalence was not related to the strength of the desire to have children. These findings are discussed in the context of attachment theory.

The evolved psychological mechanisms of fertility motivation: hunting for causation in a sea of correlation

“…socio-economic support, strengthening relationships and continuity [71,121] Under mortality priming, subjects tended towards perceiving children as less costly [58]. Moreover, in undergraduates, the psychological cost of childrearing was not affected by attachment style ( §6e) or gender [100]. Child cost is also discussed in §6k.…”

The relation between attachment and intergenerational support

“…Insecure parents offered less comfort to their children in a painful medical procedure as compared to secure parents (Goodman et al 1997). Parental avoidance seems to be negatively associated with their support for the child in a teaching task (Rholes et al 1995), and additionally, highly avoidant parents were less responsive when their children showed high distress in an inoculation procedure, while parents low in avoidance increased their responsiveness when their children were distressed (Edelstein et al 2004). Since attachment plays also an important role for older adults (Bradley and Cafferty 2001), the present study goes beyond existing research by investigating the relation between parents' attachment and support given to their adult children.…”

Are men universally more dismissing than women? Gender differences in romantic attachment across 62 cultural regions

“…Evidence also suggests that these early attachment styles affect our ability to relate to others in close personal relationships well into adulthood (Simpson & Rholes, 1998;Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albertstein, 2000). For example, attachment stylesboth secure and insecure-seem to have an enduring influence on parent-child relations (George & Solomon, 1999;Rholes, Simpson, & Blakely, 1995), peer relationships and friendships (Allen & Land, 1999;Feeney, Noller, & Patty, 1993), teacher-student dynamics (Sroufe, 1983), therapeutic interactions (Slade, 1999), and even the way people form close relationships with God (Kirkpatrick, 1999).…”