The Attachment Relationship and Effects of Parent-Child Separation on School Adjustment

Abstract

The attachment relationships developed by children towards their parents in the first years of life will be the stage on which all manifestations and physiological, emotional, cognitive functioning, social experiences, language development, acquisition of a sense of self and world will take place. These bonds create psychological structures that provide individuals with lifelong adaptive capacities, security, and confidence in relation to the attachment figure -the representative adult (Bowlby, 1969; Bretherton, 1992; Groh et al., 2017). Childhood is the setting in which emotional stability, the security offered by the presence of the adult, provides the premises for personality development. The temporary separation of children from their parents who choose to emigrate produces psycho-affective, social and educational imbalances. Our study investigated the relationship between parental attachment style and adaptive difficulties in the educational environment of children left at home after parental emigration. Statistical results indicate that school adjustment of children with emigrating parents is statistically significantly predicted by attachment style.