ERIC Number: EJ1142164
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016
Pages: 3
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2192-001X
EISSN: N/A
Does Mother's Rather than Father's Attachment Representation Contribute to the Adolescent's Attachment Representation? Commentary on: "Maternal Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) Collected During Pregnancy Predicts Reflective Functioning in AAIs from their First-Born Children 17 Years Later"
Spangler, Gottfried
International Journal of Developmental Science, v10 n3-4 p125-127 2016
In this commentary, Spangler evaluates the Steele, Perez, Segal, and Steele report that arguede that reflective functioning in adolescence could not be predicted by quality of early infant attachment, but was associated with maternal (but not paternal) attachment representation, assessed before the adolescents' birth. Assuming that parental attachment representations are quite stable during adulthood, it could be expected that they contribute to attachment differences in their children at any age. Spangler provides alternatives as to why he does not support the monotropy hypothesis of Steele and colleagues. First, as long as caregiving in western cultures, despite enduring efforts on equally distributing caregiving tasks to mothers and fathers, is mainly accomplished by the mothers, they might be more influential simply because they provide the children with more experiences than fathers do. Thus, it is not the mothers specifically who are influential, it is the caregiver who spends more relevant amounts of time with the child. Second, based on their findings from their German longitudinal studies, it was concluded that mothers and fathers may be influential in different domains, with the father's influence on social outcome of children lying in the domain of experiences during play situations. [For "Maternal Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) Collected During Pregnancy Predicts Reflective Functioning in AAIs from their First-Born Children 17 Years Later," see EJ1142160.]
Descriptors: Mothers, Attachment Behavior, Interviews, Adults, Pregnancy, Adolescents, Scores, Parent Influence, Child Development, Reflection, Emotional Response, Fathers, Parent Child Relationship, Longitudinal Studies, Foreign Countries, Birth Order
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom (London); Germany
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Adult Attachment Interview
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A