Attachment-based intervention improves Japanese parent-child relationship quality: A pilot study

Abstract

As attachment-based interventions are widely practiced in the community, more evidence of intervention effect is necessary and there are few studies in non-Western contexts. This pilot study aimed to test the effectiveness of the attachment-based intervention, the Circle of Security Parenting (COSP) program, in an urban community in Japan. A one-group pretest, post-test, follow-up design was used. Twenty-six mothers with 1- to 6-years-old children attended group intervention sessions that consisted of COSP and additional individual video review sessions. The assessments were conducted four times for each participant: before COSP, after COSP, after the first phase of video review sessions, and 6-months after the intervention. COSP was effective in reducing parenting stress in the child domain, and the additional video reviews improved the quality of child attachment over time, as the number of children classified as secure increased at 6 months after the intervention. Mothers’ attachment representations and mothers’ stress in the parent domain did not change over time. The current pilot study provides the groundwork for further tests of the effectiveness of attachment-based interventions in Japan and other non-Western countries. Future studies with larger samples, control group, and randomization are needed including the addition of follow-up assessments to capture sleeper effects in the improvement of child attachment security, as well as the use of dimensions to capture subtle changes in attachment quality in the shorter term.