Maternal Sensitivity, Child-Mother Attachment, and Children’s Cognitive/Language Outcomes: A Meta-Analytical Structural Equation Model

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Abstract

Attachment theory has long posited that children’s early experiences with their caregivers shape their lifelong development (Bowlby, 1969). Recent meta-analyses have shown that children with a secure attachment to their mothers have more positive social and emotional outcomes (Groh et al., 2017). In contrast, the association between attachment and cognitive and language outcomes has received comparably less attention. This may have occurred, at least in part, due to contrasting hypotheses as to how attachment may influence children’s development of cognition and language. Some scholars believe that attachment relationships provide a unique context for the development of cognitive and language skills (van IJzendoorn, 1995), while others posit that associations are not direct, but rather, operate as a mediator in the association between caregiver sensitivity and cognitive/language outcomes (Sroufe, 2016). Over the last 50 years, sufficient data on caregiver sensitivity, child-parent attachment, and child cognitive and language skills has accumulated, and in the current study, we take stock of this literature to explicitly test the contrasting hypotheses proposed by van IJzendoorn (1995) and Sroufe (2016) via meta-analytical structural equation modeling (MASEM). The MASEM approach is a merger of (a) traditional meta-analyses that combine effect sizes across multiple studies to derive pooled estimates, and (b) the SEM capacity to test more complex models such as mediation models. MASEMs therefore provide an ideal analytical approach to examine the mechanisms by which caregiver sensitivity, child-parent attachment, and influence child development.
Using the CASCADE catalogue (Madigan, 2020), a repository of all studies that used behavioral measures of child attachment, we identified k = 111 studies (N = 9,155 children, M = 53% boys, Mage = 27.6 months at the attachment assessment), that assessed associations between attachment security and cognitive/language outcomes. Studies then underwent data extraction for all available associations between caregiver sensitivity, child-caregiver attachment, and child cognitive/language outcomes. The samples represented were all mothers, mostly from North America or Europe (85%), at low socio-economic risk (51%), and White (M = 76%).
The MASEM analysis identified direct associations between child-parent attachment and both cognitive and language outcomes, and maternal sensitivity and cognitive and language outcomes, with effect sizes ranging from small to moderate (see Figure 1). In models for cognition and language, the indirect effect of sensitivity operated through attachment to cognitive/language outcomes, although the mediational pathway was weak. Moderators of the indirect effect were also identified (see Table 1).
These findings suggest that maternal sensitivity and child-mother attachment security both predict children’s cognitive and language outcomes. Additionally, this association operates to an extent through a mediational pathway from sensitivity to attachment security. These results suggest that maternal sensitivity and child-mother attachment matter for the development of cognitive and language skills, and that future prevention and intervention efforts should consider multiple levels of intervention. Future research in this field should focus on testing associations in fathers, as well as diverse ethnic/racial and low socio-economic samples, which were underrepresented in our analyses.

Authors

• Audrey-Ann Deneault, University of Calgary (U of C)
  Presenting Author

• Robbie Duschinsky, University of Cambridge

• Pasco Fearon, University College London (UCL)

• Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, University College London (UCL)

• Julianna Watt, University of Calgary

• Anh Ly, University of Calgary

• Sheri Madigan, University of Calgary (U of C)