Rearing Styles, Parents' Attachment Mental State,and Children's Social Abilities: The Link to Peer Acceptance

Grazia Attili,Patrizia Vermigli,Antonio Roazzi

doi:10.1155/2011/267186

Abstract

This paper examines the discriminant effect of mothers' and fathers' attachment working models, the quality of their relationships in everyday settings, and children's social abilities on children's peer acceptance. Participants were thirty-four 7–9 year olds, their mothers, and fathers. Interactions were observed at home and coded on global measures of positive, negative, controlling, disconfirming, correcting behaviors, and neutral conversation. Parents' IWM were assessed by the AAI. Children's peer acceptance and behavioral orientations as a measure of a child's social competence at school were assessed by sociometric techniques. By using both traditional statistical analyses and a multidimensional scaling approach (MDS), in terms of “similarity structure analysis (SSA)” and the “external variables as points technique,” it emerged that children's lack of success among peers associated with social behaviors which were linked to parents' rejecting/neglecting and directive interactive styles, mainly to negative, disconfirming, and a few positive interactions. These parenting styles were significantly affected by adults' insecure IWM.

Highlights

According to Bowlby [1, 2], parents provide children with demonstrations and working models of how to organize their relationships with others
In order to verify whether the associations between the quality of a parent-child relationship and parents’ IWM were influenced by the child’s gender, we initially conducted all the analyses separately for boys and girls
We found that attachment security in both mothers and fathers was linked to a relationship based on more positive behaviors—such as comforting, encouraging, helping, and protecting—and on less negative behaviors—such as criticizing, threatening, interfering, and being hostile—and disconfirming patterns—such as ignoring and answering irrelevantly— than it was the case when the associations with parents’ attachment insecure internal working models were considered

Summary

Introduction

According to Bowlby [1, 2], parents provide children with demonstrations and working models of how to organize their relationships with others. In the above-cited studies, rather than the associations between assessments of the quality of parent-child bonds and behavior in peer groups, the relation between children’s social competence and their own attachment working models was investigated on the assumption that these were the outcome of attachment relationships with parents. By contrast, it is of particular importance in assessing risk of maladaptive outcomes to have a direct measure of the quality of relationships children form with their primary caregivers (see, among others, [21]). Since many studies starting from the pioneering one by Main and Goldwin [29] have provided evidence of the associations between adults’ attachment classifications and their children’s attachment organizations [30, 31], it seems plausible to argue in favour of the hypothesis that the quality of a parent-child relationship might be considered one of the mechanisms for transferring security from parents to

Methods

Results

Conclusion