Journal article
Mothers’ and fathers’ attachment styles and power-assertive control: Indirect associations through parental representations
Journal of family psychology, Vol.36(6), pp.975-985
09/2022
DOI: 10.1037/fam0000930
PMCID: PMC9842511
PMID: 34694837
Abstract
Research on adults’ self-reported attachment styles, investigated mostly in social and personality psychology, has rarely been bridged with research on parenting, studied mostly in developmental psychology. We proposed that parents’ attachment insecurity (avoidance and anxiety) has an indirect association with their power-assertive control, mediated through their negative representations, or internal working models (IWM) of the child. In 200 community families from a Midwestern state (mothers, fathers, and children), we collected multimethod, parallel data for mother–child and father–child relationships. When children were infants, parents completed self-reports of their own attachment styles. When children were toddlers, we assessed parents’ IWMs of the child in an interview and observed parental power-assertive control in structured, naturalistic discipline contexts in the laboratory. Mothers’ avoidance showed a unique association with their IWM of their child. Consequently, there was an indirect association from the mother’s avoidance to negative IWM to power-assertive control. Mothers’ anxiety was associated directly with more power-assertive control. Fathers’ avoidance and anxiety were also associated with their IWMs, but there were no unique associations, and the impact on parenting was limited. Forging a rapprochement between social and personality research on adults’ attachment and developmental research on parenting, this work elucidates a potential mechanism of the intergenerational transmission of adaptive and maladaptive parenting in families.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Mothers’ and fathers’ attachment styles and power-assertive control: Indirect associations through parental representations
- Creators
- Danming AnGrazyna Kochanska
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of family psychology, Vol.36(6), pp.975-985
- DOI
- 10.1037/fam0000930
- PMID
- 34694837
- PMCID
- PMC9842511
- NLM abbreviation
- J Fam Psychol
- ISSN
- 0893-3200
- eISSN
- 1939-1293
- Publisher
- American Psychological Association
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000071, name: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, award: R01 HD091047; DOI: 10.13039/100000002, name: National Institutes of Health, award: UL1TR002537
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 10/25/2021
- Date published
- 09/2022
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984213414202771
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