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Abstract
Although attachment research has flourished in the past half century, several key issues remain poorly understood. Research has shown that children’s attachment to their caregivers is associated with social-emotional outcomes; however, the underlying mechanisms of this association still are unclear. The studies presented in Chapters 2 and 3 attempted to elucidate those mechanisms by examining early parent-child attachment as a key component of parental socialization processes that influence children’s social and emotional outcomes. Additionally, research is scarce and mixed regarding whether and how children integrate their early attachment experiences in their relationships with multiple caregivers. The study presented in Chapter 4 sought to contribute to this perennial question. All three studies used data from the Family Study, in which 102 children and their mothers and fathers were followed from infancy to adolescence.
In the study presented in Chapter 2, my co-authors and I examined whether early parent-child attachment might serve as a moderator of future long-term socialization cascades. We examined the long-term associations between children’s negativity towards their parents’ influence in preschool age and children’s developmental outcomes in preadolescence and tested whether those associations were moderated by children’s early security (or insecurity) in infancy. In both mother-child and father-child relationships, we found that children’s higher negativity was associated with poorer developmental outcomes only in the dyads in which infants had been insecure.
In the study presented in Chapter 3, my co-authors and I examined unique contributions of children’s attachment to mother and to father to children’s long-term social and emotional developmental outcomes. We proposed that early parent-child security would initiate successful long-term developmental trajectories by promoting children’s capacities for emotion regulation in response to frustration in preschool age, which in turn influence children’s adaptive outcomes in preadolescence. We found support for this process in both mother-child and father-child relationships.
In the study presented in Chapter 4, we examined the convergence or generalization of children’s attachment security to mother and to father and attempted to identify at what point in development this generalization or convergence takes place. We examined the concordance of children’s attachment security with mother and father at three time points: infancy, middle childhood, and preadolescence. We found no evidence of concordance in infancy, but by middle childhood, a significant association between security with mother and security with father emerged. Further, the findings suggested that by preadolescence, children may have developed an underlying latent generalized script to represent their attachment relationships.
