11.3 Consequences of Attachment

Attachments to caregivers help children form an internal working model of how relationships work. Internal working models are schemas, or frameworks for how children learn to understand themselves, others, and social relationships and learn to form emotional connections with others (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008). Children use this internal working model to form connections with peers throughout childhood and to form romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood. It has been established that secure child-caregiver attachments are associated with more positive peer relationships in middle childhood (DeMulder et al., 2000; Pallini et al., 2018) and positive romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood (Simpson et al., 2011). Gender differences are often noted in these studies. For example, boys who were more securely attached to their mothers were more popular with their peers in preschool (DeMulder et al., 2000), but a similar association is not found in preschool girls. Little research has been done with immigrant children or adolescents who may experience difficult relationships with their parents, especially when their parents’ cultural values differ from the rest of the dominant society (Qin, Way, Mukherjee, 2008). However, one study involving Mexican American adolescents and their parents showed that perceived parental warmth in early adolescence predicted friendship intimacy with same-sex friends in middle adolescence (Rodriguez et al., 2014). For children who immigrated to the United States between the ages of 6 and 14, and thus had to experience more acculturation, this association extended into late adolescence. These findings are consistent with patterns found in nonimmigrant families (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008), but they also suggest that more research is needed to examine how acculturation and immigration status can impact the association between parent-child relationships and children’s social adjustment.

Although secure child-caregiver attachments are associated with positive peer and romantic relationships for children at later ages, insecure attachment has the opposite effect. Children who have insecure attachments to their parents have a difficult time regulating their emotions and have unhealthy internal working models for how relationships should work. In longitudinal studies that followed people from infancy to their early 20s, it was found that insecure attachments with mothers during infancy were associated with those individuals reporting more negative emotions and difficulty resolving conflict with their romantic partners at 20 and 21 years of age (Simpson et al., 2007). Just as in heterosexual romantic relationships, insecure attachments in same-sex relationships are associated with poorer relationship outcomes, such as low trust and poor communication (Mohr et al., 2013). However, unlike in heterosexual relationships, insecure-anxious attachments in same-sex relationships are associated with a lower commitment to the relationship.

Other longitudinal studies indicate that attachment styles can moderate the effects that poverty stress during adolescence has on African Americans’ cellular aging as adults (Ehlrich et al., 2022). Cellular aging is a marker for one’s health and can help predict future disease diagnosis. The research found that the longer African Americans live in poverty during adolescence, the more likely they are to experience accelerated cellular aging between the ages of 20 and 27. The association is linked to experiences of chronic stress, but it becomes even stronger when African Americans report insecure avoidant attachments with their current romantic partners (Ehlrich et al., 2022). Thus, insecure attachments with parents, peers, and romantic partners can impact both how one deals with conflict in a relationship and one’s physical health. Children living in poverty may be at risk of negative outcomes that can be exacerbated by insecure attachment. However, these negative impacts can also be weakened when children and adolescents have supportive and responsive attachments with figures in their lives.