Five-year old children’s responses to story stem assessments predicts their reflective functioning at 16 years: Re-visiting the London Parent-Child Project

Abstract

This exploratory paper considered children’s responses to story-stem beginnings at age 5-years and their later responses to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) at age 16-years, where reflective functioning was reliably scored as the outcome variable of interest. Forty-five youth participated in the report who were representative, in attachment terms, of the full sample previously reported on (Steele et al., 1996; Steele et al., 2003; Steele & Steele, 2005). After controlling for verbal skills at age 5 years of age, in a linear regression procedure, two summary aggregate scores of doll play responses were shown to significantly, in non-overlapping ways, influence reflective functioning scores at age 16 years. These were: (1) prosocial (sharing and caring) themes, beta = 0.34, and (2) non-physical punitive (limit setting) themes, beta = 0.45; with 23% of the variance in reflective functioning accounted for by these play variables from 11 years previous. Discussion focuses on the relevance of Baumrind’s model of parenting to the observed results, in addition to the value of longitudinal attachment research that highlights sources of resilience and social cognition in adolescence.