[HN Gopher] Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles...
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Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most
Author : dnetesn
Score : 274 points
Date : 2025-11-14 15:11 UTC (8 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| _wire_ wrote:
| Sure, and to whom does a childhood friend first attach?
| cjbarber wrote:
| Indeed, title should perhaps be: The parents of your kids'
| friends shape the attachment style of your kids
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| If you think this is true, why is the variance explained by
| the parents so low?
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Variance explained by friends was also very low, to be
| honest.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than
| maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult
| friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent
| of the variance in adults' romantic partner- and best friend-
| specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their
| partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.
|
| Are those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot
| more variance to be explained?
| dash2 wrote:
| Right. It also suggests two possibilities:
|
| 1. Maybe the measurements are just very noisy. In which case
| they may also have other biases. 2. Maybe there are systematic
| causes which the study didn't capture. If so, controlling for
| them might change the results.
|
| Sigh. When I see a study headline like this I feel confident
| about two things. First, the study will have a weak design with
| no serious attention paid to causality, genetic confounding
| etc... second, the response to it will be full of people going
| "yes, that fits my N=1 anecdote" or "no that doesn't fit my N=1
| anecdote", in other words, critiquing the weak methodology with
| an even weaker methodology (handwaving appeals to personal
| experience).
|
| One reason social science is hard is there isn't much market
| for the truth. People just want a nice story to tell
| themselves.
| pedalpete wrote:
| My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced
| myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the
| right frame.
|
| I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes
| sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing
| schools once a year for 5 years.
|
| However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same
| house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made
| me wonder how we could be so different.
|
| But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the
| attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more
| often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship
| changes, and less ability for attachment.
| interroboink wrote:
| Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this
| study) and applying that directly that to your specific life,
| or anyone else's.
|
| I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about
| this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I
| wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:
|
| "True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true
| for that person over there".
|
| And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me"
| does not imply "true for most people."
|
| There's always some tension between people's individual
| anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like),
| and the claims of broader studies like this one.
|
| Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average,
| people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, _nobody_ actually
| has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply
| to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 100% agree. I actually think of attachment styles like this
| generally. Your upbringing does not dictate your life, it
| influences.
| jcims wrote:
| Similar story here. Six schools by seventh grade. I think it
| does mess with you a bit.
| faidit wrote:
| Same. The only friends that stuck around were people from the
| internet.
| kimfc wrote:
| Yeah I'm the same, I think I went to nine schools by the time
| I went to college in the fall of 2019, most of the school
| changes happening in elementary school. It really does effect
| your ability to make friends
| pedalpete wrote:
| I've found that I don't have trouble making friends, but
| I've put myself in situations where friendships come and
| go.
|
| I went from moving around a bunch, and making new friends
| at each place, to living in Whistler, BC, where you've got
| an annual turnover of new people, then I settled down in
| Bondi Beach, Australia, which doesn't have the turnover of
| Whistler, but not far off.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Me too, 6 schools by 7th grade, with 3 city moves. I
| unfortunately had a stutter, which made forming friendships
| harder, I basically gravitated to the outcasts. And I read a
| shit ton; by the end of 4th grade I was finishing the entire
| classic section of the high school library. Reading way over
| my head, I joined an adult book club and had my first
| introductions to serious intellectual debates; which really
| put a distance between my same age peers and my interests. My
| stutter did not really get under control until my mid 20's.
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| The family is a system, with different roles played by each
| participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often
| one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords
| the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions.
|
| What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
| softsound wrote:
| Wow that explains a lot
| elbear wrote:
| I wanted to say the same: parents don't treat all children
| the same. For example, I have the feeling that the first
| child is the "practice" child. The parents learn from the
| mistakes made with them and don't repeat them with the
| children that follow. I don't know if there's any research to
| back this up and yes, I am a first born.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| I've observed the same - unfortunately, first time parents
| are forced to try out all kinds of parenting experiments on
| their first-born, before they figure out how to be "good"
| parents. And subsequent kids, especially if they have them
| after some gap, get the benefit of this experience. Add to
| the woes of the first-born, they not only have to deal with
| normal sibling jealousy (of having to share their parents
| affection), but also resolve the emotional issue of why
| their younger siblings have an "easier" time (i.e. why
| their parents treat them "differently").
| toxik wrote:
| I think sequel kids, more than anything, benefit from
| having a trailblazer to refer to. It's no doubt true that
| parents get better at the job, but kids learn from
| demonstration. Older sibling is hypersensitive and has a
| hard time keeping friends around -> I better learn to
| swallow my pride. That kind of thing.
| balamatom wrote:
| Remember how the modern "nucular" household is largely based
| on a modernization of the Roman patriarchal property
| distribution model, where the oldest male was ascribed the
| identities of all members of his household, and vice versa?
|
| That must've been extremely efficient for legal and
| accounting purposes, once. But, well, the only theory of mind
| anyone could develop in such circumstances involves grinding
| minds into fine paste. (There's a reason the Stoics are
| "seeing" an AI-driven resurgence, even though what'd be most
| appropriate for their target audience is probably again
| Skinner.)
|
| Remember how a great deal of how we live our "personal" lives
| was invented in a slaveholding state which mandated belief in
| gods and demons. And the rest in another.
|
| We are taught to consider all of this legacy cultural
| structure in terms of "haha how quaintly did people live
| 1000-2000-3000 years ago, were they stupid". Yet most of it
| lives on in some marginally altered form due to sheer global
| force of habit.
|
| Take Western human naming schemes for example: does your
| government permit you to change your name? do you inherit one
| or both granddads' names? do you get a patronym? extra
| personal names? are you also the security force for a place,
| like a Freiherr de So-and-So? and at what exact number of
| levels of recursive self-reflection does the word "person"
| stop meaning the role played, and starts meaning the human
| playing it?
|
| (When you're done with "identity", continue with "time-
| keeping" and begin to understand another psychological
| phenomenon causing much suffering - people's generalized
| inability to discern cause and effect.)
|
| The name - the sound through which individuals are
| conditioned to respond to the concepts of selfhood and
| identity (Foobert Barber Baznix! you come here right this
| instant! it is not me but you who is sleepy and hungry!) - is
| one of many such extremely arbitrary implementation details.
|
| Out of those emerges the thing sold to us by our caregivers
| and educators as "normal life" before we are able to know any
| better. That's the main way "primary socialization" has ever
| worked: a non-consensual intergenerational transmission of
| habits that have as much to do with self-soothing in the face
| of mortality as with practical concerns; in the end they just
| ascribe "imaginariness" to your memories of your mind being
| wiped, and the "you" is ready to go.
|
| Now, in the context of all those vague and admittedly
| entirely hypothetical "implementation details", proceed to
| imagine the troop of clothed primates not as a flat list of
| incidental blood relations, but as a dynamic system, a living
| group of conscious things; if you're feeling particularly
| scifi - a sort of distributed organism. What would be the
| purpose of the scapegoat organ in that organism? Do
| individual primates have an equivalent organ in their bodies?
| (Probably not the one you're thinking of but also a valid
| guess)
| imtringued wrote:
| There is no purpose of the scapegoat organ. This is one of
| the biggest fallacies people have with regards to natural
| selection and economics.
|
| Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that
| they have perfect foresight and know the
| configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In
| other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know
| everything you don't know yet.
|
| People have the same belief with regards to natural
| selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the
| most efficient organisms.
|
| In reality there is a developmental process with no
| guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It
| is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes
| activation energy to get out of it.
|
| The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal
| cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is
| considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
|
| The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats
| so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems
| pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership
| does not have a complete picture of the problems that its
| people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an
| expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power
| to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.
| shalmanese wrote:
| We've known roughly this since The Nurture Assumption (1998).
| Where parents do have an impact is in being able to choose the
| social circles their children are immersed in.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The discussion of toddlers more or less code switching is quite
| interesting.
|
| Once they have a sense of self, even little kids will be very
| careful about revealing their home life to their school
| friends, and the same about school to their parents.
| brabel wrote:
| Haha I can see myself in that. I was terrified of my mom
| knowing what my school social life was like as I felt
| terribly embarrassed that some kids made fun of me and things
| like that.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Potentially worrisome news for the pandemic-isolation cohort,
| with their outlier experience.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Potentially beneficial as well, if they had less toxicity
| and/or had stronger family bonds than otherwise.
|
| There's so many variable, I think we can only say they could be
| different, who knows if t will be for better or worse, or
| neither.
| sishabsb wrote:
| While technically correct, painting these outcomes as so
| close to equally likely that we can't make a call is
| sinister.
|
| Locking people in their homes and away from social
| interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is
| almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to
| violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we're looking
| to break.
|
| There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic
| - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to
| justify what we did to the world. Years of people's lives
| taken.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Direct link to study abstract:
| https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
|
| PDF: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-79270-001.pdf
| DFHippie wrote:
| In general your kids' friends are much more important to them in
| the long run than you are. You are always there, but their
| friends represent the society they will be sinking or swimming
| in. They turn away from you and your tastes and opinions for a
| reason: their survival depends on understanding the tastes and
| opinions of their peers. You will stick with them (usually).
| Their peers are free to abandon them. Peer relationships are
| fragile but important. Parent-child relationships, however
| important, are much more durable, so they require less attention
| from the child.
| DFHippie wrote:
| To elaborate a bit: your parenting is much more likely to
| affect how your kids parent their kids. And, for better or for
| worse, mostly what they'll be doing is avoiding the mistakes
| you made. Your mom was distant and judgmental? You'll be super
| attentive and supportive, assuming your kids need what you
| wanted. And quite likely you'll overshoot the mark and set up a
| pitfall your kids will avoid when it's their turn. And they
| will then overshoot the mark. The cycle of parenting. Hakuna
| Matata.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Is this anecdata/personal folklore/"common sense" or is this
| based on science? It sounds like the former, tbh. Things tend
| to be more complex than this.
| arjie wrote:
| I suspect it's the former, but it doesn't seem outrageous
| (like all "common sense"). I think the hard part is to
| replicate the parts one's parents did right. Like IT, when
| someone gets things right, they're invisible. When they get
| things wrong, it seems like the only thing they ever did.
| This is part of why I want my children's grandparents
| involved as much as possible in their life. I need to
| \alpha \times \grandparents + (1 - \alpha) \times \parents
| my kids.
| DFHippie wrote:
| I think it's pretty obviously me pontificating from
| personal observations. Did you see the "hakuna matata"?
| We're allowed to do that here.
|
| And yes, sure, it's more complicated than that. It's always
| more complicated. It's unlikely the final word on any topic
| will fit in an HN comment.
| kappi wrote:
| duplicate post of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790575
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| Here's another report that speaks with the researchers directly
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-childhood-rel...
|
| And the paper:
|
| https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
| voidfunc wrote:
| Didn't really have friends as a kid, probably explains why I
| prefer the cold glow of a computer.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Know what you mean
| 64718283661 wrote:
| Same, so what should one do if AI ruins it? It hasn't yet. It's
| not good enough, but with the amount of money pouring in I
| think it could be cracked within 5 years. I hope not.. Coding
| with AI ruins the enjoyment. And willfully falling behind
| others using tools to be better than anyone without it isn't
| good either. I enjoy computers because my skill level is high
| enough that I can make money on my own and do what I want by
| using my skills to beat competitors. My research and
| experiments are meaningful because it is not all so trivial and
| instantly replicable yet.
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote:
| Get a 6502 acorn and write assembly
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not sure this is generalizable. I had lots of friends as a kid.
| Still prefer the computer :)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| On the participants composition:
|
| > 705 participants and their families over 3 decades, from the
| time participants were infants until they were approximately 30
| years old (Mage = 28.6, SD = 1.2; 78.7% White, non-Hispanic,
| 53.6% female, 46.4% male).
|
| It looks like an a fairly culturally homogeneous pannel, it would
| be interesting to also have a breakdown on religion (especially
| due to the communal effects) and income.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| From https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2026-79270-001.pdf
|
| The income data: ------------------------------ Student status
| Part-time 34 (4.9%) Full-time 61 (8.7%) Employment Part-time,
| for pay 85 (12.1%) Full-time, for pay 516 (73.7%) Individual
| income <US $10,000 78 (11.1%) US $10,000-$29,999 167 (23.9%) US
| $30,000-$49,999 179 (25.6%) US $50,000-$99,999 213 (30.4%) US
| $100,000+ 63 (9.0%) Household income <US $20,000 75 (10.8%) US
| $20,000-$49,999 163 (23.5%) US $50,000-$99,999 248 (35.7%) US
| $100,000-$149,999 126 (18.1%) US $150,000+ 83 (11.9%)
| djmips wrote:
| I've observed children who have had tremendous close friends in
| childhood but were unable to recreate that in adulthood.
| Sometimes it's easier to make friends when you're 5.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| I'd still rather be friends with a bunch of 5 year olds.
| (Unfortunately everyone would probably think that's super
| creepy.)
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It's really sad that that's considered creepy.
|
| I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my
| late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom
| every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he
| was 14.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The whole country is engrossed in a decade+ long "pedo
| panic" to the point where you can't support a friend's kid
| by attending a school play, take them for ice cream, or
| (sometimes) even take your own child to the park without
| getting the side-eye from nosey nobodies.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Kids in that age range are uncomplicated. The only thing they
| really desire is that you play with them. They just don't
| consider anything beyond that.
|
| But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so
| it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I'm fairly
| certain it's just something we've convinced ourselves adults
| "don't do".
|
| Tag is still fun, whether you are 7 or 37.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| There's a joke here...
|
| Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else
| does. In kindergarten.
| brabel wrote:
| This would be very apt for Scandinavia too.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Seems like some of these sayings get around
|
| "We've got two seasons: summer and construction" - do you
| have that one too?
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Minnesota as well.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Adults actually have to work at making new friends and few get
| any tips on how to go about doing so. I honestly didn't really
| get any until my late 30s or 40s - and that was mostly because
| I moved to Norway and for some folks, loneliness and lacking
| connections is a real issue.
|
| Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to
| talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual
| coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly
| make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of
| baggage and anxiety yet.
|
| As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many,
| work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling,
| for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online
| (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later
| text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as
| an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of
| course it is harder as an adult.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think it's a bit more general than that because I didn't have
| any "childhood friends", just bullies who were never punished.
|
| What I did have was a great number of excellent adults in my
| life. In many ways, they were more my peers than anyone my own
| age.
|
| Their example and support made my parents instruction
| significantly more effective despite the serious challenges with
| my mental health that they didn't know how to handle.
| taurath wrote:
| No, one study doesn't upend the last few decades of understanding
| of emotional attachment.
|
| The study simply says that ability to connect w friends is more
| predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of
| parents.
|
| This happens much later so of course it's more predictive of the
| actual end effects - that's when attachment styles actually show
| up for the first time. Kids grow up to be very adaptive toward
| their parents but when they get to the rest of society that's
| when the failures of connection and the failed bids for attention
| show up.
|
| A very resilient kid will do fine with friends even with a very
| bad attachment environment. A very sensitive kid or one with
| developmental problems will struggle in social environments.
| parpfish wrote:
| One study doesn't definitively prove anything, but this is a 30
| year longitudinal analysis with 700 participants. It's way
| bigger than a typical study
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > ability to connect w friends is more predictive than
| observations they made of apparent attachment of parents
|
| So for comparing studies all measuring this^, yes that's
| true. But there could be a flaw in the methodology here,
| where their observations of parents and interpretation
| thereof may not be predictive even while the totality of
| parent behavior is.
| taurath wrote:
| The study itself doesn't say anything of the sort that the
| article title and this thread title do.
|
| I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists
| what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be
| the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some
| significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Tiny anecdote - it was only after being a parent for a
| decade or so that, when doing family history, I realised
| that my dad's parenting style -- which influenced my own so
| much -- was affected by being essentially fatherless; he
| had no direct model to base his own parenting on. WWII
| affecting children's upbringing ~70 years later.
|
| I think he did a great job when I was younger, but we
| haven't maintained a strong bond as adults (which is my
| fault as much as anything); something I want to try and
| change with my own children.
| bravura wrote:
| Call your father. And just chit chat for ten minutes.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I could see childhood friends mattering a lot precisely
| because it's the thing that can save you from the problems
| with your parents.
|
| Bad parents but good early friendships=turn out ok=don't
| show up in the data. Bad parents and bad early friendships
| = have it rough, show up in the data. The parents are the
| cause but the correlation to early friendships is even
| stronger because of the mediating effect.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| >if you polled any number of therapists what people's
| hangups are about it would be more likely to be the
| parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some
| significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
|
| I completely agree.
|
| The study looked at "individual differences in general
| attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as
| adults' relationship-specific attachment orientations in
| each of their close relationships" - each quantified. Of
| course, the study isn't about the source of trauma, but I
| don't think you can quantify any of these things - the
| source of trauma, the source of anxiety, or the source of
| attachment styles.
|
| Imagine you have a very frugal parent. Maybe that early
| influence makes you a big spender. Maybe it makes you
| cheap. Maybe you spend normally, but you're always anxious
| about not having enough. The same goes for other parental
| influence, good or bad. How does something like that show
| up on a chart? You can't quantify it and you can't
| generalize it.
|
| That said: I do think your early friendships and early
| relationships are full of useful hints. There are a lot of
| things caused by your parents that might be camouflaged
| (e.x. because the parents are older) that your own early
| friendships and relationships reveal.
| Den_VR wrote:
| Can you link the study itself? What are the demographics of
| the participants like, the usual that's clustered on one
| culture?
| jonahx wrote:
| Also, even the proposed effect is modest:
|
| > But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than
| maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult
| friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent
| of the variance in adults' romantic partner- and best friend-
| specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their
| partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.
|
| Just slightly less modest that analogous parental predictors,
| according to their claims.
| scrubs wrote:
| I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. My observation is the
| more difficult cases of attachment in important adult
| relationships esp. partner/spouse is far more impacted by
| parents and their relationship than friends.
|
| This doesn't gain say that in the ages of 15 to say 35 peer
| interactions are not there or impactful to the worse or better
| but extremes in the nuclear family are not to be
| underestimated.
| hooskerdu wrote:
| It could be said that for any of us to think we could
| understand - with such a relatively short and still arguably
| shoddy understanding of the mind - or especially could say...
| is possibly insane.
| scrubs wrote:
| Not sure what you're after in that comment. The entire
| description of mind is maybe not shoddy but definitely high
| level functional meaning it always comes with a Chinese
| menu of if/and/but on a scale of emphasis in linear
| combination with other facets.
|
| Attachment modalities as far as I can see describes some
| human dynamics.
| puppymaster wrote:
| also given the psychology field research replication crisis, I
| would wait to see if this research can be replicated down the
| road.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My own anecdotal experience matches this.
|
| I have a (now adult) child who was diagnosed with Reactive
| Attachment Disorder. She changed friends every 6 months,
| burning bridges behind her. She also cultivated the least-
| healthy friendships possible in whatever environment she found
| herself in.
| baconbrand wrote:
| How is she doing now?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Pretty well, all things considered.
| balamatom wrote:
| What was the etiology?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Entered foster care at 2 due to abuse and neglect; we were
| her fourth placement in 7 months; weekly mandated visits
| with neglectful mother and monthly mandated visits with
| abusive grandmother for 2 years before termination of
| parental rights. She had nightmares until 3am after every
| visit with grandmother. We adopted her at 5.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Bingo. This kind of science reporting is the worst.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| That history: women are to blame
| standardUser wrote:
| It kind of makes sense. We don't go out into the world thinking
| "ok, time to meet more my moms!". We can't treat anyone else
| like our mom, and vice versa. The mother-child relationship is
| probably the most important and influential for most people,
| but it's a complete anomaly. Friends are not an anomaly, their
| pretty typical, and since Mom and Dad are not friends, a young
| child has learned very little firsthand about friendship until
| it happens. Then they have some experiences with those friends
| and those experiences become better predictors of future
| attachment style than the dynamic with the mother. This makes
| sense because in the realm of friends, these are their
| formative experiences. Mom may have had an impact (and does
| according to the study), but the bigger influence on how you
| deal with future friends is in how you experienced your
| formative friends.
| em-bee wrote:
| i didn't start having friends until i entered university. and
| i spent my whole life searching for the kind of relationship
| that i wanted but didn't get from my parents. only a few
| years ago i realized that this is what i was searching for,
| and then i finally found it by realizing that i could be the
| parent to my kids that i had wanted my parents to be to me.
| my actual parents are more like friends to me than parents.
| hopelite wrote:
| Are you familiar with what the understanding is that
| differentiates/causes (very) sensitive vs (very) resilient
| kids, and whether and how that can be modulated in children or
| even the effects of it overcome in adults?
|
| I believe this is and will continue to be a growing issue as
| things like helicopter parenting and extremely anxious social
| dynamics, which were only exacerbated through the psychological
| abuse of the pandemic, starts becoming ever more dominant in
| society. I myself am a bit taken aback sometimes when taking to
| younger people and people who grew up in America specifically,
| and their expressed disbelief and exacerbation about totally
| normal things like, e.g., children walking to and from school
| or playing outdoors unsupervised until dusk.
|
| I don't know if there is a short term solution outside of
| individual or small group choice as long as our societies are
| being ravaged by a ruling class that is making everything worse
| and more dangerous by the day, but I find the topic both
| intriguing as well as sad and foreboding.
| tootie wrote:
| I read the same conclusion in a NurtureShock published 15 years
| ago and they cited similar studies.
| webspinner wrote:
| i probably spent more time at my friend's houses, than at my
| parents house when I was a kid!
| throwattached wrote:
| In case this can be helpful to somebody else, I spent my
| ~twenties ignorant of what attachment styles were, while
| definitely exhibiting some very, very obvious attachment
| patterns. And I made a lot of mistakes, and made a lot of people
| close to me sad.
|
| Reading the "Attached" book was a huge wake-up call. According to
| the questionnaire, for what it's worth, I was exhibiting ~100%
| avoidant behavior.
|
| This led to therapy, and to a lot of atonement, and growth.
|
| I just came here to say - if you have a minute, give it a read.
| And for fun, try the questionnaire:
|
| https://archive.org/details/AttachementTheory/page/n37/mode/...
|
| Best of luck
| boje wrote:
| I skimmed through it. Note that this book was written right
| before Tinder launched (2012), which might have skewed the
| demographic data points found in this edition (2010). Although
| dating apps have definitely existed before then, that (and
| popular internet adoption) have by far been the most
| influential to society at large.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| I think it just boils down to who did you experience strong
| emotion with and what are/were the outcomes of that relationship.
| mandown2308 wrote:
| From personal experience, I would say that's quite true.
| jweir wrote:
| And moms are the gate keeps of their kids friends.
| mvkel wrote:
| There's a whole book on this called "Hold On To Your Kids." It
| feels a little hand-wavy, categorically dismissing all social
| media as evil, but the core message feels right: don't stop being
| a parent.
| iambateman wrote:
| They didn't find any effect of fathers on attachment style and
| I'm confused...I've heard countless stories about how it's hard
| for people to connect as adults because of how their dad was
| toward them.
| accrual wrote:
| IMO in these kinds of studies you can interchange
| mother/father/<primary caregiver>. One can be traumatized by
| any caregiver regardless of gender if they're the primary
| adult.
| benrawk wrote:
| The title is false, the study finds that moms have a large impact
| on attachment style
| exe34 wrote:
| I believe this is called the post-treatment bias. If the causal
| arrow goes (mother-baby) -> (child-friends) -> (adult-attachment)
| and you include the middle one, you have already controlled for
| the first, and the effect disappears. Learning about the first
| tells you very little more once you have learnt the second.
| toxik wrote:
| In statistics we call it "conditional independence", attachment
| style is independent from maternal relationship if we know
| childhood friendship outcomes.
| exe34 wrote:
| yep the book statistical rethinking puts it that way too.
| reliablereason wrote:
| Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing
| something that has very high dimensionally.
|
| When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get
| problematic outcomes.
|
| This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is
| complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand
| it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low
| dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
| lkbm wrote:
| From the study abstract:
|
| > Early levels of mother-child relationship quality predicted
| individual differences in general attachment anxiety and
| avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults' relationship-specific
| attachment orientations in each of their close relationships,
| including with their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and
| best friends (median R2 = 3% for attachment anxiety and avoidance
| across relationship domains).[0]
|
| Hmmm...
|
| [0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
| biff1 wrote:
| Since the 60's people have wanted to revise the nurture side of
| psychology to downplay the role of mothers, but the reality is as
| everyone has always known, it _is_ the mothers. Sure, there's
| also biology and trauma. But Iften the trauma is related to
| interaction with the parents. Also, biology is shared most of the
| time by the parent, so bipolar mothers tend to have bipolar
| children.
|
| Anyway, people have mothers before they have friends. Our first
| relationships become a template for subsequent ones. I feel
| embarrassed for the authors and the field more generally that
| such an obvious fact is not obvious enough to prevent absurd
| claims. As with most things in our society, blame the 60's and
| all that came from it.
| jamesalvarez wrote:
| The Nautil.us article misrepresents the findings of the paper,
| suggesting that it said anything about a causal effect. The title
| 'Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most' is
| completely inacurrate and not even hinted at by the study authors
| in the paper.
| popalchemist wrote:
| The science on parental influence is well documented. This
| research may be onto something new - an additional layer of
| influence. But the personality begins to be formed by extrinsic
| influences within months of being born. Which is to say, it
| precedes the stage at which you have the ability to make friends.
|
| The relevant research is called "The Strange Situation" by Beebe.
| The research spanned decades with the same subjects. The
| universal predictor of adulthood outcomes (relationships,
| lifestyle, income, drug use, etc) was whether the mother was
| attentive and capable of attuning to the child.
| dboreham wrote:
| Obviously it's the sum of all training data, so comes from the
| available sources. Typically that would mostly be the mother
| but it depends.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Incorrect assumption, we do not remain equally plastic /
| malleable in all domains across the entirety of our life.
| Attachment style crystallizes around 18 months. Trauma can
| re-open the issue later in life, but the personality builds
| in layers, with relationship to primary caretaker (usually
| mom) being a cornerstone.
| tehjoker wrote:
| am i reading this right that the effect size is 4%? how does this
| say anything?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Wouldn't they, if you limited the study to the last 30 years
| during which mothers barely got to see their kids because of
| work? If you check 30 years from now it will be "Favorite Video
| Games and Internet Personalities, Not Childhood Friends, Shape
| Attachment Styles Most"
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