Attachment avoidance, but not anxiety, minimizes the joys of caregiving

ABSTRACT

Perhaps unlike other social roles that people may hold, caring for children offers opportunities for both immense joy and incredible frustration. Yet what predicts how parents will feel during caregiving experiences? In the current study, we examined parents’ (N = 152) positive emotion, negative emotion, and felt meaning during caregiving using the Day Reconstruction Method. In addition, we tested attachment anxiety and avoidance as predictors of parents’ emotion during caregiving relative to their other daily experiences. We found that attachment avoidance was associated with elevated negative emotion and reduced positive emotion and meaning in life across the entire day, whereas attachment anxiety was associated with elevated negative emotion and marginally greater meaning in life, but not positive emotion, across the entire day. Furthermore, caregiving was associated with greater positive emotion and meaning, but not negative emotion, compared to parents’ other daily activities. Finally, attachment avoidance, but not anxiety, was associated with lower levels of positive emotion, negative emotion, and felt meaning during caregiving compared to other daily activities. These findings are consistent with other evidence that attachment avoidance is associated with deactivation of emotion in close relationships and suggest that attachment avoidance minimizes the joys of parenting.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• parenting
• positive emotion
• negative emotion
• meaning in life

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our participants for providing us with the details of their daily lives, as well as the Family, Health, and Well-Being Lab at the University of the South and the CARE Lab at Pomona College for fruitful conversations on early versions of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Follow-up analyses using discrete emotion items as outcomes revealed similar patterns across the discrete emotions.