Multiple domains of parental secure base support during childhood and adolescence contribute to adolescents’ representations of attachment as a secure base script

ABSTRACT

Although attachment theory claims that early attachment representations reflecting the quality of the child’s “lived experiences” are maintained across developmental transitions, evidence that has emerged over the last decade suggests that the association between early relationship quality and adolescents’ attachment representations is fairly modest in magnitude. We used aspects of parenting beyond sensitivity over childhood and adolescence and early security to predict adolescents’ scripted attachment representations. At age 18 years, 673 participants from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development completed the Attachment Script Assessment from which we derived an assessment of secure base script knowledge. Measures of secure base support from childhood through age 15 years (e.g., parental monitoring of child activity, father presence in the home) were selected as predictors and accounted for an additional 8% of the variance in secure base script knowledge scores above and beyond direct observations of sensitivity and early attachment status alone, suggesting that adolescents’ scripted attachment representations reflect multiple domains of parenting. Cognitive and demographic variables also significantly increased predicted variance in secure base script knowledge by 2% each.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment representation
• adolescent
• script
• sensitivity
• parenting

Acknowledgements

Research reported here was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R01 HD069442 to Glenn I. Roisman, R01 HD054822 to Cathryn Booth-LaForce, Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station/Lindsey Foundation grant ALA080-049 and National Science Foundation grant BCS 12-51322 to Brian E. Vaughn, and F32 HD078250 to Theodore E.A. Waters. Correspondence concerning this paper should be directed to: Brian E. Vaughn, Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849 (email: [email protected]) or to Glenn I. Roisman, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (email: [email protected]).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.