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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the right frame.
I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years.
However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different.
But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.
Me too, 6 schools by 7th grade, with 3 city moves. I unfortunately had a stutter, which made forming friendships harder, I basically gravitated to the outcasts. And I read a shit ton; by the end of 4th grade I was finishing the entire classic section of the high school library. Reading way over my head, I joined an adult book club and had my first introductions to serious intellectual debates; which really put a distance between my same age peers and my interests. My stutter did not really get under control until my mid 20's.
Yeah I'm the same, I think I went to nine schools by the time I went to college in the fall of 2019, most of the school changes happening in elementary school. It really does effect your ability to make friends
I've found that I don't have trouble making friends, but I've put myself in situations where friendships come and go.
I went from moving around a bunch, and making new friends at each place, to living in Whistler, BC, where you've got an annual turnover of new people, then I settled down in Bondi Beach, Australia, which doesn't have the turnover of Whistler, but not far off.
Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this study) and applying that directly that to your specific life, or anyone else's.
I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:
"True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there".
And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people."
There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one.
Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.
The family is a system, with different roles played by each participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions.
What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
I wanted to say the same: parents don't treat all children the same. For example, I have the feeling that the first child is the "practice" child. The parents learn from the mistakes made with them and don't repeat them with the children that follow. I don't know if there's any research to back this up and yes, I am a first born.
I think sequel kids, more than anything, benefit from having a trailblazer to refer to. It's no doubt true that parents get better at the job, but kids learn from demonstration. Older sibling is hypersensitive and has a hard time keeping friends around -> I better learn to swallow my pride. That kind of thing.
I've observed the same - unfortunately, first time parents are forced to try out all kinds of parenting experiments on their first-born, before they figure out how to be "good" parents. And subsequent kids, especially if they have them after some gap, get the benefit of this experience. Add to the woes of the first-born, they not only have to deal with normal sibling jealousy (of having to share their parents affection), but also resolve the emotional issue of why their younger siblings have an "easier" time (i.e. why their parents treat them "differently").
Remember how the modern "nucular" household is largely based on a modernization of the Roman patriarchal property distribution model, where the oldest male was ascribed the identities of all members of his household, and vice versa?
That must've been extremely efficient for legal and accounting purposes, once. But, well, the only theory of mind anyone could develop in such circumstances involves grinding minds into fine paste. (There's a reason the Stoics are "seeing" an AI-driven resurgence, even though what'd be most appropriate for their target audience is probably again Skinner.)
Remember how a great deal of how we live our "personal" lives was invented in a slaveholding state which mandated belief in gods and demons. And the rest in another.
We are taught to consider all of this legacy cultural structure in terms of "haha how quaintly did people live 1000-2000-3000 years ago, were they stupid". Yet most of it lives on in some marginally altered form due to sheer global force of habit.
Take Western human naming schemes for example: does your government permit you to change your name? do you inherit one or both granddads' names? do you get a patronym? extra personal names? are you also the security force for a place, like a Freiherr de So-and-So? and at what exact number of levels of recursive self-reflection does the word "person" stop meaning the role played, and starts meaning the human playing it?
(When you're done with "identity", continue with "time-keeping" and begin to understand another psychological phenomenon causing much suffering - people's generalized inability to discern cause and effect.)
The name - the sound through which individuals are conditioned to respond to the concepts of selfhood and identity (Foobert Barber Baznix! you come here right this instant! it is not me but you who is sleepy and hungry!) - is one of many such extremely arbitrary implementation details.
Out of those emerges the thing sold to us by our caregivers and educators as "normal life" before we are able to know any better. That's the main way "primary socialization" has ever worked: a non-consensual intergenerational transmission of habits that have as much to do with self-soothing in the face of mortality as with practical concerns; in the end they just ascribe "imaginariness" to your memories of your mind being wiped, and the "you" is ready to go.
Now, in the context of all those vague and admittedly entirely hypothetical "implementation details", proceed to imagine the troop of clothed primates not as a flat list of incidental blood relations, but as a dynamic system, a living group of conscious things; if you're feeling particularly scifi - a sort of distributed organism. What would be the purpose of the scapegoat organ in that organism? Do individual primates have an equivalent organ in their bodies? (Probably not the one you're thinking of but also a valid guess)
There is no purpose of the scapegoat organ. This is one of the biggest fallacies people have with regards to natural selection and economics.
Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that they have perfect foresight and know the configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know everything you don't know yet.
People have the same belief with regards to natural selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the most efficient organisms.
In reality there is a developmental process with no guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes activation energy to get out of it.
The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership does not have a complete picture of the problems that its people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.
The science on parental influence is well documented. This research may be onto something new - an additional layer of influence. But the personality begins to be formed by extrinsic influences within months of being born. Which is to say, it precedes the stage at which you have the ability to make friends.
The relevant research is called "The Strange Situation" by Beebe. The research spanned decades with the same subjects. The universal predictor of adulthood outcomes (relationships, lifestyle, income, drug use, etc) was whether the mother was attentive and capable of attuning to the child.
Incorrect assumption, we do not remain equally plastic / malleable in all domains across the entirety of our life. Attachment style crystallizes around 18 months. Trauma can re-open the issue later in life, but the personality builds in layers, with relationship to primary caretaker (usually mom) being a cornerstone.
> 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.
Are those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot more variance to be explained?
1. Maybe the measurements are just very noisy. In which case they may also have other biases.
2. Maybe there are systematic causes which the study didn't capture. If so, controlling for them might change the results.
Sigh. When I see a study headline like this I feel confident about two things. First, the study will have a weak design with no serious attention paid to causality, genetic confounding etc... second, the response to it will be full of people going "yes, that fits my N=1 anecdote" or "no that doesn't fit my N=1 anecdote", in other words, critiquing the weak methodology with an even weaker methodology (handwaving appeals to personal experience).
One reason social science is hard is there isn't much market for the truth. People just want a nice story to tell themselves.
Since the 60’s people have wanted to revise the nurture side of psychology to downplay the role of mothers, but the reality is as everyone has always known, it is the mothers. Sure, there’s also biology and trauma. But Iften the trauma is related to interaction with the parents. Also, biology is shared most of the time by the parent, so bipolar mothers tend to have bipolar children.
Anyway, people have mothers before they have friends. Our first relationships become a template for subsequent ones. I feel embarrassed for the authors and the field more generally that such an obvious fact is not obvious enough to prevent absurd claims. As with most things in our society, blame the 60’s and all that came from it.
Same, so what should one do if AI ruins it? It hasn't yet. It's not good enough, but with the amount of money pouring in I think it could be cracked within 5 years. I hope not.. Coding with AI ruins the enjoyment. And willfully falling behind others using tools to be better than anyone without it isn't good either. I enjoy computers because my skill level is high enough that I can make money on my own and do what I want by using my skills to beat competitors. My research and experiments are meaningful because it is not all so trivial and instantly replicable yet.
I've observed children who have had tremendous close friends in childhood but were unable to recreate that in adulthood. Sometimes it's easier to make friends when you're 5.
Adults actually have to work at making new friends and few get any tips on how to go about doing so. I honestly didn't really get any until my late 30s or 40s - and that was mostly because I moved to Norway and for some folks, loneliness and lacking connections is a real issue.
Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of baggage and anxiety yet.
As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many, work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling, for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of course it is harder as an adult.
I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he was 14.
The whole country is engrossed in a decade+ long "pedo panic" to the point where you can't support a friend's kid by attending a school play, take them for ice cream, or (sometimes) even take your own child to the park without getting the side-eye from nosey nobodies.
Kids in that age range are uncomplicated. The only thing they really desire is that you play with them. They just don’t consider anything beyond that.
But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just something we’ve convinced ourselves adults “don’t do”.
> Early levels of mother–child relationship quality predicted individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships, including with their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and best friends (median R² = 3% for attachment anxiety and avoidance across relationship domains).[0]
The Nautil.us article misrepresents the findings of the paper, suggesting that it said anything about a causal effect. The title 'Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most' is completely inacurrate and not even hinted at by the study authors in the paper.
I think it’s a bit more general than that because I didn’t have any “childhood friends”, just bullies who were never punished.
What I did have was a great number of excellent adults in my life. In many ways, they were more my peers than anyone my own age.
Their example and support made my parents instruction significantly more effective despite the serious challenges with my mental health that they didn’t know how to handle.
> 705 participants and their families over 3 decades, from the time participants were infants until they were approximately 30 years old (Mage = 28.6, SD = 1.2; 78.7% White, non-Hispanic, 53.6% female, 46.4% male).
It looks like an a fairly culturally homogeneous pannel, it would be interesting to also have a breakdown on religion (especially due to the communal effects) and income.
The income data:
------------------------------
Student status
Part-time 34 (4.9%)
Full-time 61 (8.7%)
Employment
Part-time, for pay 85 (12.1%)
Full-time, for pay 516 (73.7%)
Individual income
<US $10,000 78 (11.1%)
US $10,000–$29,999 167 (23.9%)
US $30,000–$49,999 179 (25.6%)
US $50,000–$99,999 213 (30.4%)
US $100,000+ 63 (9.0%)
Household income
<US $20,000 75 (10.8%)
US $20,000–$49,999 163 (23.5%)
US $50,000–$99,999 248 (35.7%)
US $100,000–$149,999 126 (18.1%)
US $150,000+ 83 (11.9%)
They didn’t find any effect of fathers on attachment style and I’m confused…I’ve heard countless stories about how it’s hard for people to connect as adults because of how their dad was toward them.
IMO in these kinds of studies you can interchange mother/father/<primary caregiver>. One can be traumatized by any caregiver regardless of gender if they're the primary adult.
Wouldn't they, if you limited the study to the last 30 years during which mothers barely got to see their kids because of work? If you check 30 years from now it will be "Favorite Video Games and Internet Personalities, Not Childhood Friends, Shape Attachment Styles Most"
We've known roughly this since The Nurture Assumption (1998). Where parents do have an impact is in being able to choose the social circles their children are immersed in.
The discussion of toddlers more or less code switching is quite interesting.
Once they have a sense of self, even little kids will be very careful about revealing their home life to their school friends, and the same about school to their parents.
Haha I can see myself in that. I was terrified of my mom knowing what my school social life was like as I felt terribly embarrassed that some kids made fun of me and things like that.
Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing something that has very high dimensionally.
When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.
This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
There's a whole book on this called "Hold On To Your Kids." It feels a little hand-wavy, categorically dismissing all social media as evil, but the core message feels right: don't stop being a parent.
In case this can be helpful to somebody else, I spent my ~twenties ignorant of what attachment styles were, while definitely exhibiting some very, very obvious attachment patterns. And I made a lot of mistakes, and made a lot of people close to me sad.
Reading the "Attached" book was a huge wake-up call. According to the questionnaire, for what it's worth, I was exhibiting ~100% avoidant behavior.
This led to therapy, and to a lot of atonement, and growth.
I just came here to say - if you have a minute, give it a read. And for fun, try the questionnaire:
I skimmed through it. Note that this book was written right before Tinder launched (2012), which might have skewed the demographic data points found in this edition (2010). Although dating apps have definitely existed before then, that (and popular internet adoption) have by far been the most influential to society at large.
While technically correct, painting these outcomes as so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.
Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.
There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to justify what we did to the world. Years of people’s lives taken.
In general your kids' friends are much more important to them in the long run than you are. You are always there, but their friends represent the society they will be sinking or swimming in. They turn away from you and your tastes and opinions for a reason: their survival depends on understanding the tastes and opinions of their peers. You will stick with them (usually). Their peers are free to abandon them. Peer relationships are fragile but important. Parent-child relationships, however important, are much more durable, so they require less attention from the child.
To elaborate a bit: your parenting is much more likely to affect how your kids parent their kids. And, for better or for worse, mostly what they'll be doing is avoiding the mistakes you made. Your mom was distant and judgmental? You'll be super attentive and supportive, assuming your kids need what you wanted. And quite likely you'll overshoot the mark and set up a pitfall your kids will avoid when it's their turn. And they will then overshoot the mark. The cycle of parenting. Hakuna Matata.
Is this anecdata/personal folklore/"common sense" or is this based on science? It sounds like the former, tbh. Things tend to be more complex than this.
I suspect it's the former, but it doesn't seem outrageous (like all "common sense"). I think the hard part is to replicate the parts one's parents did right. Like IT, when someone gets things right, they're invisible. When they get things wrong, it seems like the only thing they ever did. This is part of why I want my children's grandparents involved as much as possible in their life. I need to \alpha \times \grandparents + (1 - \alpha) \times \parents my kids.
I believe this is called the post-treatment bias. If the causal arrow goes (mother-baby) -> (child-friends) -> (adult-attachment) and you include the middle one, you have already controlled for the first, and the effect disappears. Learning about the first tells you very little more once you have learnt the second.
In statistics we call it "conditional independence", attachment style is independent from maternal relationship if we know childhood friendship outcomes.
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.
One study doesn’t definitively prove anything, but this is a 30 year longitudinal analysis with 700 participants. It’s way bigger than a typical study
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.
>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.
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.
Call your father. And just chit chat for ten minutes.
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.
Can you link the study itself? What are the demographics of the participants like, the usual that’s clustered on one culture?
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.
Bingo. This kind of science reporting is the worst.
Also, even the proposed effect is modest:
> 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.
My own anecdotal experience matches this.
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.
What was the etiology?
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.
How is she doing now?
Pretty well, all things considered.
also given the psychology field research replication crisis, I would wait to see if this research can be replicated down the road.
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.
That history: women are to blame
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.
My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the right frame.
I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years.
However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different.
But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.
Similar story here. Six schools by seventh grade. I think it does mess with you a bit.
Me too, 6 schools by 7th grade, with 3 city moves. I unfortunately had a stutter, which made forming friendships harder, I basically gravitated to the outcasts. And I read a shit ton; by the end of 4th grade I was finishing the entire classic section of the high school library. Reading way over my head, I joined an adult book club and had my first introductions to serious intellectual debates; which really put a distance between my same age peers and my interests. My stutter did not really get under control until my mid 20's.
Yeah I'm the same, I think I went to nine schools by the time I went to college in the fall of 2019, most of the school changes happening in elementary school. It really does effect your ability to make friends
I've found that I don't have trouble making friends, but I've put myself in situations where friendships come and go.
I went from moving around a bunch, and making new friends at each place, to living in Whistler, BC, where you've got an annual turnover of new people, then I settled down in Bondi Beach, Australia, which doesn't have the turnover of Whistler, but not far off.
Same. The only friends that stuck around were people from the internet.
Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this study) and applying that directly that to your specific life, or anyone else's.
I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:
"True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there".
And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people."
There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one.
Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.
100% agree. I actually think of attachment styles like this generally. Your upbringing does not dictate your life, it influences.
The family is a system, with different roles played by each participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions.
What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
I wanted to say the same: parents don't treat all children the same. For example, I have the feeling that the first child is the "practice" child. The parents learn from the mistakes made with them and don't repeat them with the children that follow. I don't know if there's any research to back this up and yes, I am a first born.
I think sequel kids, more than anything, benefit from having a trailblazer to refer to. It's no doubt true that parents get better at the job, but kids learn from demonstration. Older sibling is hypersensitive and has a hard time keeping friends around -> I better learn to swallow my pride. That kind of thing.
I've observed the same - unfortunately, first time parents are forced to try out all kinds of parenting experiments on their first-born, before they figure out how to be "good" parents. And subsequent kids, especially if they have them after some gap, get the benefit of this experience. Add to the woes of the first-born, they not only have to deal with normal sibling jealousy (of having to share their parents affection), but also resolve the emotional issue of why their younger siblings have an "easier" time (i.e. why their parents treat them "differently").
Wow that explains a lot
Remember how the modern "nucular" household is largely based on a modernization of the Roman patriarchal property distribution model, where the oldest male was ascribed the identities of all members of his household, and vice versa?
That must've been extremely efficient for legal and accounting purposes, once. But, well, the only theory of mind anyone could develop in such circumstances involves grinding minds into fine paste. (There's a reason the Stoics are "seeing" an AI-driven resurgence, even though what'd be most appropriate for their target audience is probably again Skinner.)
Remember how a great deal of how we live our "personal" lives was invented in a slaveholding state which mandated belief in gods and demons. And the rest in another.
We are taught to consider all of this legacy cultural structure in terms of "haha how quaintly did people live 1000-2000-3000 years ago, were they stupid". Yet most of it lives on in some marginally altered form due to sheer global force of habit.
Take Western human naming schemes for example: does your government permit you to change your name? do you inherit one or both granddads' names? do you get a patronym? extra personal names? are you also the security force for a place, like a Freiherr de So-and-So? and at what exact number of levels of recursive self-reflection does the word "person" stop meaning the role played, and starts meaning the human playing it?
(When you're done with "identity", continue with "time-keeping" and begin to understand another psychological phenomenon causing much suffering - people's generalized inability to discern cause and effect.)
The name - the sound through which individuals are conditioned to respond to the concepts of selfhood and identity (Foobert Barber Baznix! you come here right this instant! it is not me but you who is sleepy and hungry!) - is one of many such extremely arbitrary implementation details.
Out of those emerges the thing sold to us by our caregivers and educators as "normal life" before we are able to know any better. That's the main way "primary socialization" has ever worked: a non-consensual intergenerational transmission of habits that have as much to do with self-soothing in the face of mortality as with practical concerns; in the end they just ascribe "imaginariness" to your memories of your mind being wiped, and the "you" is ready to go.
Now, in the context of all those vague and admittedly entirely hypothetical "implementation details", proceed to imagine the troop of clothed primates not as a flat list of incidental blood relations, but as a dynamic system, a living group of conscious things; if you're feeling particularly scifi - a sort of distributed organism. What would be the purpose of the scapegoat organ in that organism? Do individual primates have an equivalent organ in their bodies? (Probably not the one you're thinking of but also a valid guess)
There is no purpose of the scapegoat organ. This is one of the biggest fallacies people have with regards to natural selection and economics.
Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that they have perfect foresight and know the configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know everything you don't know yet.
People have the same belief with regards to natural selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the most efficient organisms.
In reality there is a developmental process with no guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes activation energy to get out of it.
The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership does not have a complete picture of the problems that its people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.
The science on parental influence is well documented. This research may be onto something new - an additional layer of influence. But the personality begins to be formed by extrinsic influences within months of being born. Which is to say, it precedes the stage at which you have the ability to make friends.
The relevant research is called "The Strange Situation" by Beebe. The research spanned decades with the same subjects. The universal predictor of adulthood outcomes (relationships, lifestyle, income, drug use, etc) was whether the mother was attentive and capable of attuning to the child.
Obviously it's the sum of all training data, so comes from the available sources. Typically that would mostly be the mother but it depends.
Incorrect assumption, we do not remain equally plastic / malleable in all domains across the entirety of our life. Attachment style crystallizes around 18 months. Trauma can re-open the issue later in life, but the personality builds in layers, with relationship to primary caretaker (usually mom) being a cornerstone.
> 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.
Are those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot more variance to be explained?
Right. It also suggests two possibilities:
1. Maybe the measurements are just very noisy. In which case they may also have other biases. 2. Maybe there are systematic causes which the study didn't capture. If so, controlling for them might change the results.
Sigh. When I see a study headline like this I feel confident about two things. First, the study will have a weak design with no serious attention paid to causality, genetic confounding etc... second, the response to it will be full of people going "yes, that fits my N=1 anecdote" or "no that doesn't fit my N=1 anecdote", in other words, critiquing the weak methodology with an even weaker methodology (handwaving appeals to personal experience).
One reason social science is hard is there isn't much market for the truth. People just want a nice story to tell themselves.
Since the 60’s people have wanted to revise the nurture side of psychology to downplay the role of mothers, but the reality is as everyone has always known, it is the mothers. Sure, there’s also biology and trauma. But Iften the trauma is related to interaction with the parents. Also, biology is shared most of the time by the parent, so bipolar mothers tend to have bipolar children.
Anyway, people have mothers before they have friends. Our first relationships become a template for subsequent ones. I feel embarrassed for the authors and the field more generally that such an obvious fact is not obvious enough to prevent absurd claims. As with most things in our society, blame the 60’s and all that came from it.
Didn't really have friends as a kid, probably explains why I prefer the cold glow of a computer.
Same, so what should one do if AI ruins it? It hasn't yet. It's not good enough, but with the amount of money pouring in I think it could be cracked within 5 years. I hope not.. Coding with AI ruins the enjoyment. And willfully falling behind others using tools to be better than anyone without it isn't good either. I enjoy computers because my skill level is high enough that I can make money on my own and do what I want by using my skills to beat competitors. My research and experiments are meaningful because it is not all so trivial and instantly replicable yet.
Get a 6502 acorn and write assembly
Not sure this is generalizable. I had lots of friends as a kid. Still prefer the computer :)
[dead]
Know what you mean
I've observed children who have had tremendous close friends in childhood but were unable to recreate that in adulthood. Sometimes it's easier to make friends when you're 5.
Adults actually have to work at making new friends and few get any tips on how to go about doing so. I honestly didn't really get any until my late 30s or 40s - and that was mostly because I moved to Norway and for some folks, loneliness and lacking connections is a real issue.
Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of baggage and anxiety yet.
As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many, work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling, for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of course it is harder as an adult.
I'd still rather be friends with a bunch of 5 year olds. (Unfortunately everyone would probably think that's super creepy.)
It’s really sad that that’s considered creepy.
I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he was 14.
The whole country is engrossed in a decade+ long "pedo panic" to the point where you can't support a friend's kid by attending a school play, take them for ice cream, or (sometimes) even take your own child to the park without getting the side-eye from nosey nobodies.
Kids in that age range are uncomplicated. The only thing they really desire is that you play with them. They just don’t consider anything beyond that.
But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just something we’ve convinced ourselves adults “don’t do”.
Tag is still fun, whether you are 7 or 37.
There's a joke here...
Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else does. In kindergarten.
This would be very apt for Scandinavia too.
Minnesota as well.
From the study abstract:
> Early levels of mother–child relationship quality predicted individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships, including with their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and best friends (median R² = 3% for attachment anxiety and avoidance across relationship domains).[0]
Hmmm...
[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
The Nautil.us article misrepresents the findings of the paper, suggesting that it said anything about a causal effect. The title 'Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most' is completely inacurrate and not even hinted at by the study authors in the paper.
I think it’s a bit more general than that because I didn’t have any “childhood friends”, just bullies who were never punished.
What I did have was a great number of excellent adults in my life. In many ways, they were more my peers than anyone my own age.
Their example and support made my parents instruction significantly more effective despite the serious challenges with my mental health that they didn’t know how to handle.
On the participants composition:
> 705 participants and their families over 3 decades, from the time participants were infants until they were approximately 30 years old (Mage = 28.6, SD = 1.2; 78.7% White, non-Hispanic, 53.6% female, 46.4% male).
It looks like an a fairly culturally homogeneous pannel, it would be interesting to also have a breakdown on religion (especially due to the communal effects) and income.
From https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2026-79270-001.pdf
The income data: ------------------------------ Student status Part-time 34 (4.9%) Full-time 61 (8.7%) Employment Part-time, for pay 85 (12.1%) Full-time, for pay 516 (73.7%) Individual income <US $10,000 78 (11.1%) US $10,000–$29,999 167 (23.9%) US $30,000–$49,999 179 (25.6%) US $50,000–$99,999 213 (30.4%) US $100,000+ 63 (9.0%) Household income <US $20,000 75 (10.8%) US $20,000–$49,999 163 (23.5%) US $50,000–$99,999 248 (35.7%) US $100,000–$149,999 126 (18.1%) US $150,000+ 83 (11.9%)
Direct link to study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
PDF: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-79270-001.pdf
They didn’t find any effect of fathers on attachment style and I’m confused…I’ve heard countless stories about how it’s hard for people to connect as adults because of how their dad was toward them.
IMO in these kinds of studies you can interchange mother/father/<primary caregiver>. One can be traumatized by any caregiver regardless of gender if they're the primary adult.
Wouldn't they, if you limited the study to the last 30 years during which mothers barely got to see their kids because of work? If you check 30 years from now it will be "Favorite Video Games and Internet Personalities, Not Childhood Friends, Shape Attachment Styles Most"
We've known roughly this since The Nurture Assumption (1998). Where parents do have an impact is in being able to choose the social circles their children are immersed in.
The discussion of toddlers more or less code switching is quite interesting.
Once they have a sense of self, even little kids will be very careful about revealing their home life to their school friends, and the same about school to their parents.
Haha I can see myself in that. I was terrified of my mom knowing what my school social life was like as I felt terribly embarrassed that some kids made fun of me and things like that.
And moms are the gate keeps of their kids friends.
Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing something that has very high dimensionally.
When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.
This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
The title is false, the study finds that moms have a large impact on attachment style
There's a whole book on this called "Hold On To Your Kids." It feels a little hand-wavy, categorically dismissing all social media as evil, but the core message feels right: don't stop being a parent.
In case this can be helpful to somebody else, I spent my ~twenties ignorant of what attachment styles were, while definitely exhibiting some very, very obvious attachment patterns. And I made a lot of mistakes, and made a lot of people close to me sad.
Reading the "Attached" book was a huge wake-up call. According to the questionnaire, for what it's worth, I was exhibiting ~100% avoidant behavior.
This led to therapy, and to a lot of atonement, and growth.
I just came here to say - if you have a minute, give it a read. And for fun, try the questionnaire:
https://archive.org/details/AttachementTheory/page/n37/mode/...
Best of luck
I skimmed through it. Note that this book was written right before Tinder launched (2012), which might have skewed the demographic data points found in this edition (2010). Although dating apps have definitely existed before then, that (and popular internet adoption) have by far been the most influential to society at large.
Here’s another report that speaks with the researchers directly
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-childhood-rel...
And the paper:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
I think it just boils down to who did you experience strong emotion with and what are/were the outcomes of that relationship.
am i reading this right that the effect size is 4%? how does this say anything?
i probably spent more time at my friend's houses, than at my parents house when I was a kid!
Potentially worrisome news for the pandemic-isolation cohort, with their outlier experience.
Potentially beneficial as well, if they had less toxicity and/or had stronger family bonds than otherwise.
There's so many variable, I think we can only say they could be different, who knows if t will be for better or worse, or neither.
While technically correct, painting these outcomes as so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.
Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.
There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to justify what we did to the world. Years of people’s lives taken.
In general your kids' friends are much more important to them in the long run than you are. You are always there, but their friends represent the society they will be sinking or swimming in. They turn away from you and your tastes and opinions for a reason: their survival depends on understanding the tastes and opinions of their peers. You will stick with them (usually). Their peers are free to abandon them. Peer relationships are fragile but important. Parent-child relationships, however important, are much more durable, so they require less attention from the child.
To elaborate a bit: your parenting is much more likely to affect how your kids parent their kids. And, for better or for worse, mostly what they'll be doing is avoiding the mistakes you made. Your mom was distant and judgmental? You'll be super attentive and supportive, assuming your kids need what you wanted. And quite likely you'll overshoot the mark and set up a pitfall your kids will avoid when it's their turn. And they will then overshoot the mark. The cycle of parenting. Hakuna Matata.
Is this anecdata/personal folklore/"common sense" or is this based on science? It sounds like the former, tbh. Things tend to be more complex than this.
I suspect it's the former, but it doesn't seem outrageous (like all "common sense"). I think the hard part is to replicate the parts one's parents did right. Like IT, when someone gets things right, they're invisible. When they get things wrong, it seems like the only thing they ever did. This is part of why I want my children's grandparents involved as much as possible in their life. I need to \alpha \times \grandparents + (1 - \alpha) \times \parents my kids.
I believe this is called the post-treatment bias. If the causal arrow goes (mother-baby) -> (child-friends) -> (adult-attachment) and you include the middle one, you have already controlled for the first, and the effect disappears. Learning about the first tells you very little more once you have learnt the second.
In statistics we call it "conditional independence", attachment style is independent from maternal relationship if we know childhood friendship outcomes.
yep the book statistical rethinking puts it that way too.
From personal experience, I would say that's quite true.
Sure, and to whom does a childhood friend first attach?
Indeed, title should perhaps be: The parents of your kids' friends shape the attachment style of your kids
If you think this is true, why is the variance explained by the parents so low?
Variance explained by friends was also very low, to be honest.
duplicate post of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790575