Patterns of parenting: revisiting mechanistic models

ABSTRACT

This commentary argues for the need to revisit the foundations of attachment theory and its tradition of formulating testable mechanistic models of relationship development and change. Modeling and simulation may be useful to test novel theoretical propositions, such as the one stating that pleasure in parenting may be a determinant of secure father-infant attachment relationships (Brown & Cox, this issue). We discuss this proposition’s plausibility, by relating parenting pleasure to the temporal patterning of parenting, a neglected property in parent-child interaction. Simulation work may not only offer first test runs of novel hypotheses, but may also guide empirical researchers to the most likely time-scale on which such hypotheses should be tested.

The study by Brown and Cox (this issue) is among a growing set of studies that seek to broaden the set of precursors of parent–child attachment security beyond an exclusive focus on parental sensitivity. Attachment theory states that individual differences arise due to differences in children’s history of care, with parental sensitivity as its most salient feature. However, meta-analyses have shown that mothers’ sensitivity only modestly explains differences in infant attachment security (r = .24, k = 21, N = 1,099; De Wolff & Van IJzendoorn, 1997), and this association is even weaker in fathers (r = .12, k = 16, N = 1,355; Lucassen et al., 2011). Studies like the study by Brown and Cox may yield much-needed clues about how individual differences in parent–child attachment security develop.

Need for revisiting the mechanistic model of attachment

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1982) offers a model explaining how vulnerable infants are kept safe while they acquire the socioemotional skills to function in groups of conspecifics, to affiliate, and ultimately to survive and reproduce. Functional parts of the model are (1) the tendency among children to seek proximity to selected caregivers under conditions that signal danger and (2) the tendency among caregivers to prioritize children’s signals and needs above other concerns. Through repeated interactions with caregivers, children are thought to develop Internal Working Models (IWMs), cognitive frameworks that encompass internal representations of the self and others and interactive behavior, which enable the formation of primary or secondary attachment behavioral strategies that optimize felt security.

The mechanistic psychological model of attachment theory provides a firm basis for testable hypotheses with regard to the role of parental sensitivity for attachment security. Sensitive parental behavior is encoded into attachment IWMs in which others are represented as trustworthy and available if needed. These secure attachment IWMs in turn translate into secure attachment behavioral patterns in the child. However, in hindsight, it is not clear from the model why after Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) reported that maternal sensitivity was the strongest predictor of attachment security among their set of variables, research almost exclusively focused on their concept of sensitivity as the key indicator of parental availability, capability, and commitment. Therefore, proposals are welcome to study additional dimensions of parental behavior that may convey information relevant for children’s attachment system.

Brown and Cox (this issue) propose that “fathers who are both sensitive and happily invested in their parenting role are seen by their infants as especially trustworthy and reliable sources of emotional security” [p. 17]. This implies that children encode their experiences as a combination of needs being met and predominant affective state of the parent. However, this proposal still begs the question why children would encode paternal affect if they have not otherwise learnt to associate parental display of pleasure with consequences for their felt security. The answer perhaps lies in the second explanation proposed by Brown and Cox, namely that “fathers who also take pleasure in parenting may be the most likely to engage in a continuous, sustained pattern of sensitive and responsive caregiving” (p. 17). This suggestion calls attention toward the temporal patterning in parental behavior, of which paternal pleasure may be an important correlate.

Patterns of parenting and pleasure

While Brown and Cox do not point to a particular theory for labeling pleasure in parenting as an indicator of sustained sensitivity, relevant frameworks can be found in theories on motivation, goal-regulation, and the role of emotion. Although direct evidence is still lacking, indirect support for the idea that pleasure differentiates between parents whose sensitivity may be conditional and short-lived and parents whose sensitivity is sustained, comes from Dix, Gershoff, Meunier, and Miller (2004), who observed less dyadic asymmetry and more synchrony when parents reported more child-oriented joy during interaction with their child. Dix et al. theorized that a child-oriented goal structure predisposes parents to experience joy and interest during caregiving, which contributes to synchrony and diminishes conflict by facilitating social engagement and focus on the child. Joy and pleasure may thus be part of a self-sustaining cycle of child-oriented motivation and harmonious parent–child interactions, which are unlikely in the absence of joy in caregiving. Other circumstantial evidence comes from Lee, Schoppe-Sullivan, and Dush (2012) showing that mothers and fathers who set very high goal standards for themselves as parents reported higher satisfaction in their parental role (akin to parental pleasure). For fathers, in particular, this self-oriented parenting perfectionism was also associated with higher parenting self-efficacy and lower parenting stress, which would be consistent with sustained child-focused parenting.

Thus, there are theoretical and empirical arguments to propose that pleasure may serve a motivational function within the caregiving behavioral system. Pleasure may have powerful effects if it leads to the formulation of primary or secondary parenting strategies. A primary strategy, for instance, to optimize pleasure in the context of caregiving would be to try to support the child, that is to be sensitive. If parents find it difficult, for one reason or another, to muster this support, secondary strategies may develop that either minimize involvement with caregiving (e.g. by being absent or curtailing intimate contact) or maximize involvement (e.g. by being intrusive or controlling). The mechanistic model for attachment states that children’s attachment behavioral systems foster adaptation to the parenting behaviors flowing from these strategies to maximize felt security, which presumably may lock parent–child interaction in patterns of secure or insecure attachment that acquire stability over time.

Implications for research

Rather than testing alternative dimensions of caregiving behavior in addition to sensitivity to explain individual differences in attachment security, the work by Brown and Cox leads us to consider alternative qualities of behavior patterns, in this case, consistency of sensitivity over time. However, testing hypotheses in this regard might prove challenging, as operationalizing consistency requires repeated assessments of sensitivity over days, weeks, or months – a laborious, time-consuming and expensive task. An alternative approach might be found in computational modeling, which has proven to be a pillar for progress and a marker for theoretical credibility in neighboring fields such as cognitive science (McClelland, 2009). True to attachment theory’s roots in control systems theory and cybernetics, there continues to be a small body of work within attachment research that reformulates theoretical propositions so that computational simulations and experiments can be run “in silico” (e.g. Bischof, 1975; Petters & Beaudoin, 2017). This work may be coopted to test whether the newly proposed mechanistic model leads to the phenomena as observed, to discover the primary parameters of consistent sensitivity in the data (e.g. the time-scale in which interactive patterns stabilize), and to generate testable hypotheses. Simulations might be used to test whether pleasure is a necessary parameter together with sensitivity to reach a steady dyadic state that might be called secure attachment and to get insight into the time-resolution in which sensitivity should be assessed. Results can be used to fine-tune the theoretical model, e.g. with regard to type and resolution of data, and to formulate critical tests of hypotheses, the outcomes of which can be used for further shaping the model.

Conclusion

The study by Brown and Cox offers an interesting avenue for research that may help us to better understand how individual differences in attachment security develop. As Brown and Cox suggest, a theoretical argument can be made that pleasure in parenting leads to consistently sensitive caregiving behaviors, which might play an important role in how children encode parental behavior and incorporate it into their expectations with regard to emotional availability.

Parental cognitions such as pleasure also emerge as meta-analytic moderators in the intergenerational transmission of attachment (Verhage et al., 2016). However, as pointed out by Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (2019), parental cognitions are not visible to the child, only parental behavior is. Therefore, the theoretical approach that the parental cognition of pleasure may affect child attachment security can only be meaningful for attachment research and theory development in the context of a mechanistic pathway via parenting behavior. A continuous, sustained pattern of sensitive and responsive caregiving in parents who experience pleasure in being a parent as suggested by Brown and Cox might offer such a mechanism.

This may be particularly relevant for fathers: although paternal and maternal roles appear to be converging, fathers’ role in caregiving might leave room for inconsistencies and withdrawing from responsibilities at times, which may not be an option for many mothers (Fagan, Day, Lamb, & Cabrera, 2014). In mothers, consistency in sensitive responsiveness might be less a function of pleasure and more a function of other determinants, such as attachment representations (Lindhiem, Bernard, & Dozier, 2011). Still, we would argue that consistency alone cannot offer a sufficient explanation for differences in attachment security but always needs to be examined in the context of the relevant behavior. For example, consistently insensitive parental behavior may lead to different expectations with regard to parental availability and thus different attachment outcomes than consistently sensitive parental behavior.

Simulations offer an efficient possibility to further develop hypotheses with regard to the role of parental cognitions for variability and consistency in parenting behavior. Not only for understanding paternal sensitivity, but more broadly, this approach might help to increase theoretical precision of extension to attachment theoretical formulations and provide guidance for collecting the data “in the real world” necessary to understand how parenting is related to children’s attachment internal working models and individual differences in attachment security.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.