Bidirectional Influences of Insecure Parent-child Attachment and Anxiety Symptoms in Chinese Preschoolers

• In Event: 1-070 - Exploring Links between Family Processes and Child Development in China

Integrative Statement

In both Western and non-Western cultures, it has been widely demonstrated that early childhood anxiety is concurrently and predictively associated with substantive impairment and adjustment difficulties across multiple domains, including social difficulties (e.g., poor social skills, exclusion, victimization), internalizing problems (e.g., low self-esteem, loneliness, depression), difficulties at school (e.g., school avoidance, learning problems), and other psychiatric difficulties. Children's attachment beliefs also appear to influence their socioemotional development. Indeed, starting in infancy, children who are insecurely attached tend to be concurrently and subsequently more anxious than their securely attached counterparts. Developmental psychopathologists have long posited a reciprocal relation between parent-child relationships and the development of child anxiety symptoms. Yet, little empirical research has utilized a longitudinal design that would allow exploration of this bi-directional influence between parent-child attachment and child anxiety. Thus, this study aimed to examine the reciprocal effect between insecure parent-child attachment and child anxiety, and it was a short-term longitudinal study, with data collected at two time periods over the course of a single year.
Participants were 266 children (146 boys, 120 girls, Mage = 4.74 years, SD = 0.60) recruited from two public kindergartens (13 classrooms) in Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. At Time 1 mothers rated their children’s anxiety (separation anxiety, physical injury fears, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and generalized anxiety) using Spence Children's Anxiety Scale and children’s insecure attachment (resistant attachment and avoidant attachment) using Parent-child Relationship Scale. After one year (at Time 2), mothers redid the ratings on the two scales.
As all the data was collected from mothers, common method bias tests were needed. Based on what Zhou and Long (2004) suggested, we used confirmatory factor analysis to conduct common method bias tests and set the common factor a value of 1. We found that the fit index (χ2/df = 9.05，p < .001, RMSEA = .18，NFI = .63，GFI = .65) is non-ideal, confirming that serious common method bias did not exist. Correlation analyses indicated that both child anxiety (separation anxiety, physical injury fears, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and generalized anxiety) at Time 1 and Time 2 was significantly and positively associated with both insecure parent-child attachment (resistant attachment and avoidant attachment) at Time 1 and Time 2. The AMOS 22.0 was computed to explore the reciprocal effects between child anxiety and parent-child attachment and the results indicated: (1) The cross-lagged regression analyses indicated the model fit well (χ2=225.88, df=69, χ2/df = 3.27, p < .001, RMSEA = .09，NFI = .89，IFI = .92，GFI = .92). Time 1 child anxiety significantly predicted the insecure parent-child attachment at Time 2, insecure parent-child attachment at Time 1could also significantly predicted child anxiety at Time 2 (see Figure 1.).

Authors

• Yan Li, Shanghai Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Jingjing Zhu, Shanghai Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yun Zhang, The Second People’s Hospital Jiangning
  Non-Presenting Author