Poster #142 - Japanese Mothers’ Attachment Security Affects Their Evaluation of Their Children’s Developmental Skills

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

The first report of intergenerational transmission of attachment administering the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) in Japan has been recently published. The findings were similar to those found elsewhere in the world, further validating the cross-cultural applicability of these widely used measures and the universality of the attachment phenomenon. This study further examined how Japanese mothers’ attachment security assessed by the AAI is related to the mothers’ evaluation of their infants’ developmental skills. The mothers filled out the “Tsumori Infant Developmental Test” questionnaire, a commonly used developmental assessment test in Japan, to evaluate child performance in everyday activities. The test measures five domains of infant development; motor skills, cognitive skills, social skills, language skills, and self-help skills.
Forty-four Japanese mothers participated in this part of the study. The two-way distribution of the sample was 25 (57%) secure and 19 (43%) insecure. Results from a series of Independent-t-tests revealed that mothers with secure states of mind evaluated their child’s social skills significantly higher than did mothers with insecure states of mind (t = 2.03, p = .048). For four other domains of infant development, we found no significant differences between the groups. When we additionally compared 7 (18%) mothers judged Unresolved (U) with 33 (82%) mothers judged non-Unresolved (non-U), two out of five domains revealed significant differences, non-U mothers evaluated their infants’ performance skills significantly higher than did U mothers (see Table 1).
The results indicate that Japanese mothers with secure states of mind are more likely to promote social skills in their children who were consequently evaluated higher in this domain than were children of mothers with insecure states of mind. This makes sense because people with secure states of mind are known to value attachment relationships. Thus, secure mothers may prioritize fostering healthy emotional bonds over motor or cognitive skills. In addition, striking differences were found between U mothers and non-U mothers in the way they view their infants’ developmental skills in this normative Japanese sample. To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined how U status might affect the mother’s evaluation of their children’s developmental skills. Future studies should include a larger N or possibly a non-normative sample, which may expect more U, to better understand how U mothers evaluate their children’s developmental skills differently than do non-U mothers. The needs for follow-up studies to examine child developmental outcome assessed by evaluators other than mothers will be also discussed.

Authors

• KAZUKO Y BEHRENS, State University of New York Polytechnic Institute
  Presenting Author

• Kiyomi Kondo-Ikemura, Teikyo University
  Non-Presenting Author