Children's Representations of Attachment and Positive Teacher-Child Relationships.

Manuela Veríssimo,Brian E Vaughn,Carla Fernandes,Filipa Silva,António J Santos,Nuno Torres

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02270

Abstract

This study was designed to explore whether children's representations of attachment contribute to the co-construction of positive teacher–child relationships. An assessment of verbal intelligence was included as a predictor on the assumption that teachers might perceive themselves as having better relationships with more verbally competent children. Participants were 52 children from two pre-schools, in the district of Lisbon. The Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) was used to assess children's attachment security. The PCV-P (a scale developed in portuguese language) was used to describe teacher–child relationships through teachers' ratings of child secure base behavior and emotion regulation and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-R) was used to access verbal skills. Bivariate correlations showed that the teachers' rating of child secure base behavior was significantly associated with both child attachment security and verbal IQ. In a multiple regression analysis, the overall model R2 was significant, as was the interaction term showing a moderating effect of attachment security on the relation between verbal IQ and teachers' ratings of secure base. The results suggest that co-construction of a close attachment-relevant relationship with teachers in early childhood is, in part, a function of the security in the context of parent-child attachment, but also of child verbal development.

Highlights

As attachment theory and research has expanded to consider a variety of attachment figures with overlapping, not identical, spheres of influence (e.g., Lamb, 2005; Monteiro et al, 2010), there have been conceptual as well as empirical discussions of attachment “networks”, i.e., the sets of adults to whom a child has co-constructed an attachment relationship, and the effects of secure vs. insecure relationships across all members of these networks. van IJzendoorn (2005) and others have argued that the attachment network is integrated, even if not exactly additive, and that the child’s construction of an internal working model of attachment is influenced to varying degrees by all of her/his attachment relationships
Preliminary analyses tested for relations between the demographic indicators and teachers’ ratings of child secure base behavior and emotion regulation and attachment representations
Attachment security is associated with verbal Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Summary

Introduction

There are, very few studies that allow a determination of whether the contributions of each attachment relationship to internal working models is equivalent to that of all other attachments, or if they do not contribute or whether there is a valid metric for weighting the Attachment and Teacher–Child Relationships influences of different attachment relationships Regardless of how these questions are resolved, it is clear that with increasing age and maturity the number of significant relationships for a given child increases as they enter into more complex and diverse social groups beyond the original parent-child dyad(s) (e.g., Lamb, 2005; van IJzendoorn, 2005). Neither did we find any reports of children protesting for any length of time when separated from teachers for weekends or grieving when their teacher leaves the class before the end of a term or when the child moves to a new classroom with a different teacher in sequential academic years, yet these kinds of reactions are commonplace when a young child loses a parent through abandonment, divorce, or death (Bowlby, 1982, 1989)

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