Preschool insecure attachment and externalizing behaviors
In this post, I’m going to include a recent article as well as work by one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Karlen Lyons-Ruth. Deneault, Bureau, & Yurkowski, K. (2022) published “Do Child–Father and Child–Mother Preschool Insecure Attachment Types Predict the Development of Externalizing Behaviors in Boys and Girls during Middle Childhood?” in Developmental Psychology. Deneault et al. begin by observing that, “Past meta-analyses show that both child–mother and child–father attachment insecurity are independently and jointly associated with more externalizing behaviors in children. Little is known, however, on the ways that different types of insecure attachment independently and jointly predict the development of externalizing behaviors over time.”
They studied 144 preschool-aged children (averaging just under four years old), using a separation-reunion procedure with each parent. They collected data about the child’s externalizing behavior then and five years later. Child–mother and child–father attachment predicted the development of externalizing behaviors in both boys and girls. Interestingly but not surprisingly, when the child’s attachment toward both parents was ambivalent, there were more externalizing behaviors.
They also found that child–father controlling-caregiving attachment predicted the development of fewer externalizing behaviors. This is where Lyons-Ruth comes in. She and Kate Henninghausen are at Harvard Medical School and have extensively studied attachment. They note that controlling forms of attachment behavior reflect malfunction in the attachment relational system. Controlling behaviors can be either punitive or caregiving:
Controlling-punitive behaviour is characterized by the child's attempts to maintain the parent’s attention and involvement through hostile, coercive or more subtly humiliating behaviours. Controlling-caregiving behaviour is characterized by the child's attempts to maintain the parent’s attention and involvement by entertaining, organizing, directing or giving approval to the parent. Both disorganized attachment strategies in infancy and controlling attachment strategies in the preschool years are associated with preschool and school-aged aggression and psychopathology. (Henninghausen & Lyons-Ruth, 2019).
Taken together, this work suggests that, when distressed preschoolers seek their fathers’ attention in what the father sees as positive and caregiving behavior, the preschoolers less often develop externalizing behaviors. This doesn’t mean that their attachment distress is less severe. Here, there are several questions I’d like future research to explore. Are there temperamental differences between those children who exhibit controlling-punitive and controlling-caregiving behaviors? Does controlling-caregiving behavior predict internalizing behaviors which wasn’t assessed in the Deneault et al. study? Should teachers be taught to be just as concerned about controlling-caregiving behavior as about controlling-punitive behavior?