The Role of Parenting and Mother-Adolescent Attachment in the Intergenerational Similarity of Internalizing Symptoms

Abstract

Parental depression has been identified as a risk factor for children's and adolescents' internalizing problems. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the role of maternal parenting behaviors (i.e., responsiveness and autonomy-support) and adolescents' representations of attachment to their mother (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) in the intergenerational similarity of internalizing symptoms. The sample was heterogeneous and consisted of referred (42%) and non-referred adolescents (N=238, 31% female) and their mothers. Both adolescents and mothers reported on internalizing symptoms, parenting behaviors and all adolescents reported on mother-child attachment. Results showed that parenting behaviors and mother-adolescent attachment explain at least part of the intergenerational congruence of internalizing symptoms. Moreover, there were meaningful and specific associations between dimensions of parenting and dimensions of attachment. Higher responsiveness was primarily related to lower avoidance and higher autonomy-support was primarily related to lower anxiety. The current study's results suggest that maternal depressive symptoms relate to maladaptive parenting strategies and insecure attachment representations in adolescents. Further, both attachment anxiety and avoidance seem to relate positively to adolescents' internalizing symptoms. Targeting both parenting and attachment may form a fruitful approach to prevent and treat internalizing problems in adolescence.

Autonomy and Autonomy Disturbances in Self‐Development and Psychopathology: Research on Motivation, Attachment, and Clinical Process

“…Their studies confirmed that adolescents with more secure attachment to parents were, in fact, better adjusted, and had parents who were more autonomy supportive. These findings have been well replicated, including recent studies of both referred and nonreferred youth and their mothers, in which parental autonomy support related to lower anxiety-based attachment, while parental responsiveness and sensitivity related to lower avoidance-based attachment (Brenning, Soenens, Braet, & Bal, 2012;Karavasilis, Doyle, & Markiewicz, 2003).…”

The role of the mother–child relationship for anxiety disorders and depression: results from a prospective-longitudinal study in adolescents and their mothers

“…During interaction tasks, mothers of depressed children and mothers with a history of depression or current depressive symptoms displayed higher levels of disengagement than control mothers [25]. Moreover, adolescent anxiety symptoms were associated with lower maternal autonomy support, and anxious adolescents and their mothers perceive lower levels of childautonomy within the mother-child relationship [35,36]. Consistently, mothers of anxious children were less warm and autonomy granting during conversational tasks and more intrusively involved during cognitive tasks than control mothers [37][38][39][40].…”

“…Previous research on familial and parental risk factors for anxiety and depression suggests that especially adverse parental rearing styles and unfavorable characteristics of the parent-child relationship increase the risk for offspring anxiety and depression [11,14,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. Particularly the role of parental rearing for offspring anxiety and depression has been extensively studied [11,14,[29][30][31][32][33][34].…”

Chores, Incubator for a Strong Parent-Child Relationship

“…Parental love serves as the seed for children's love and other positive emotions such as caring, empathy, compassion, generosity, and even trust [50,[54][55][56][57]. According to the attachment theory [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67], attaining or maintaining proximity to a caring mother figure is critically important for children and neglectful parenting has serious ill-effects on a child's personality development and aspects of mental health, such as depression. Parental love has also been found to be strongly related to a prosocial disposition [68].…”