No, one study doesn’t upend the last few decades of understanding of emotional attachment.
The study simply says that ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents.
This happens much later so of course it’s more predictive of the actual end effects - that’s when attachment styles actually show up for the first time. Kids grow up to be very adaptive toward their parents but when they get to the rest of society that’s when the failures of connection and the failed bids for attention show up.
A very resilient kid will do fine with friends even with a very bad attachment environment. A very sensitive kid or one with developmental problems will struggle in social environments.
The study itself doesn't say anything of the sort that the article title and this thread title do.
I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
Tiny anecdote - it was only after being a parent for a decade or so that, when doing family history, I realised that my dad's parenting style -- which influenced my own so much -- was affected by being essentially fatherless; he had no direct model to base his own parenting on. WWII affecting children's upbringing ~70 years later.
I think he did a great job when I was younger, but we haven't maintained a strong bond as adults (which is my fault as much as anything); something I want to try and change with my own children.
>if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
I completely agree.
The study looked at “individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships” - each quantified. Of course, the study isn’t about the source of trauma, but I don’t think you can quantify any of these things - the source of trauma, the source of anxiety, or the source of attachment styles.
Imagine you have a very frugal parent. Maybe that early influence makes you a big spender. Maybe it makes you cheap. Maybe you spend normally, but you’re always anxious about not having enough. The same goes for other parental influence, good or bad. How does something like that show up on a chart? You can’t quantify it and you can’t generalize it.
That said: I do think your early friendships and early relationships are full of useful hints. There are a lot of things caused by your parents that might be camouflaged (e.x. because the parents are older) that your own early friendships and relationships reveal.
I could see childhood friends mattering a lot precisely because it's the thing that can save you from the problems with your parents.
Bad parents but good early friendships=turn out ok=don't show up in the data. Bad parents and bad early friendships = have it rough, show up in the data. The parents are the cause but the correlation to early friendships is even stronger because of the mediating effect.
> ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents
So for comparing studies all measuring this^, yes that’s true. But there could be a flaw in the methodology here, where their observations of parents and interpretation thereof may not be predictive even while the totality of parent behavior is.
I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. My observation is the more difficult cases of attachment in important adult relationships esp. partner/spouse is far more impacted by parents and their relationship than friends.
This doesn't gain say that in the ages of 15 to say 35 peer interactions are not there or impactful to the worse or better but extremes in the nuclear family are not to be underestimated.
It could be said that for any of us to think we could understand - with such a relatively short and still arguably shoddy understanding of the mind - or especially could say… is possibly insane.
Not sure what you're after in that comment. The entire description of mind is maybe not shoddy but definitely high level functional meaning it always comes with a Chinese menu of if/and/but on a scale of emphasis in linear combination with other facets.
Attachment modalities as far as I can see describes some human dynamics.
> But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.
Just slightly less modest that analogous parental predictors, according to their claims.
I have a (now adult) child who was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder. She changed friends every 6 months, burning bridges behind her. She also cultivated the least-healthy friendships possible in whatever environment she found herself in.
Entered foster care at 2 due to abuse and neglect; we were her fourth placement in 7 months; weekly mandated visits with neglectful mother and monthly mandated visits with abusive grandmother for 2 years before termination of parental rights. She had nightmares until 3am after every visit with grandmother. We adopted her at 5.
Believe me, we didn't save her; she's doing as well as she is because of the hard work she put in (particularly in her later teenage years). I hope the environment we provided helped her in that, but I don't think I can take much of the credit.
It kind of makes sense. We don't go out into the world thinking "ok, time to meet more my moms!". We can't treat anyone else like our mom, and vice versa. The mother-child relationship is probably the most important and influential for most people, but it's a complete anomaly. Friends are not an anomaly, their pretty typical, and since Mom and Dad are not friends, a young child has learned very little firsthand about friendship until it happens. Then they have some experiences with those friends and those experiences become better predictors of future attachment style than the dynamic with the mother. This makes sense because in the realm of friends, these are their formative experiences. Mom may have had an impact (and does according to the study), but the bigger influence on how you deal with future friends is in how you experienced your formative friends.
i didn't start having friends until i entered university. and i spent my whole life searching for the kind of relationship that i wanted but didn't get from my parents. only a few years ago i realized that this is what i was searching for, and then i finally found it by realizing that i could be the parent to my kids that i had wanted my parents to be to me. my actual parents are more like friends to me than parents.
Are you familiar with what the understanding is that differentiates/causes (very) sensitive vs (very) resilient kids, and whether and how that can be modulated in children or even the effects of it overcome in adults?
I believe this is and will continue to be a growing issue as things like helicopter parenting and extremely anxious social dynamics, which were only exacerbated through the psychological abuse of the pandemic, starts becoming ever more dominant in society. I myself am a bit taken aback sometimes when taking to younger people and people who grew up in America specifically, and their expressed disbelief and exacerbation about totally normal things like, e.g., children walking to and from school or playing outdoors unsupervised until dusk.
I don’t know if there is a short term solution outside of individual or small group choice as long as our societies are being ravaged by a ruling class that is making everything worse and more dangerous by the day, but I find the topic both intriguing as well as sad and
foreboding.
The study simply says that ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents.
This happens much later so of course it’s more predictive of the actual end effects - that’s when attachment styles actually show up for the first time. Kids grow up to be very adaptive toward their parents but when they get to the rest of society that’s when the failures of connection and the failed bids for attention show up.
A very resilient kid will do fine with friends even with a very bad attachment environment. A very sensitive kid or one with developmental problems will struggle in social environments.