> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
49 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 73.2 ms ] threadAre those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot more variance to be explained?
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.
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.
What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
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.
PDF: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-79270-001.pdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-childhood-rel...
And the paper:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001
> 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.
Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else does. In kindergarten.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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