Emotion Understanding and Children’s Attachment Security to Mothers and Fathers Across the Transition to Siblinghood

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

The birth of a baby sibling is a significant developmental milestone for young children. Early research by Dunn & Kenrdick (1982) reported that firstborn children were more friendly towards their siblings when mothers used more emotion talk to focus children’s attention on the feelings of the infant sibling, suggesting that children’s emotional understanding (EU) may play a role in how they adjust to the new arrival. A secure parent-child attachment creates a safe environment for children to experience and discuss a diverse range of emotional situations, which supports the development of EU (Thompson, 1998). Insecure parent-child attachment may elicit anxiety and defensive exclusion, whereby children actively exclude emotional information that makes them anxious, which in turn, can undermine the development of EU. Previous studies have found robust relations between secure mother-child attachment relationships and better EU in children (see Cooke et al., 2006 for review). The majority of these studies were cross-sectional and only included mothers and not fathers as children’s attachment figures. Because fathers are important supports for children during the transition to a baby sibling, it is vital to consider children’s attachment relationships to fathers to predict children’s EU. Previous studies have only considered attachment security as a predictor of EU, and not whether children’s EU might strengthen parent-child attachment relationships. Therefore, the current investigation examined the bidirectional effects between children’s attachment to both mothers and fathers and their EU longitudinally across three-time points before and after the birth of a sibling.

Participants included 158 mothers, fathers, and children (M age = 34.49 months, range = 24 to 67) who were part of a longitudinal study examining children’s adjustment after the birth of a second child. The current investigation included three-time points: prenatal, 4, and 12 months after the infants’ birth. At each time, mothers and fathers completed the Attachment Q-sort to assess children’s attachment security, and children completed a battery of EU assessments, consisting of eight EU components.

A structural equation model was conducted to test the developmental cascade model shown in Figure 1, in which we examined the bidirectional relations between children’s attachment security to both parents and the growth in their EU over time. There was significant stability of children’s attachment security to both parents over time, as well as in EU. High attachment security to mothers was significantly related to high attachment security to fathers at both prenatal and 4 months. At the prenatal timepoint only, children’s EU was significantly correlated with attachment security to both parents, with more secure attachments related to better EU, even after child age was controlled. Attachment security was no longer related to children’s EU at later times, nor was there evidence of bidirectional relations over time between attachment and EU. Even though there were relations as expected between attachment and EU, further growth in EU across the year after the birth is not predicted by attachment security, and advances in children EU after the birth does not appear to affect children’s attachments to either mothers or fathers.

Authors

• Lin Tan, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Presenting Author

• Yeonjee Bae, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brenda L Volling, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Richard Gonzalez, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author