Relations among attachment quality, parenting style, quality of family environment, and social adjustment

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the impact of attachment to primary caregiver, parental style, and family environment on social adjustment of young adolescents. Another objective of this study was to examine relations among quality of attachment, parenting style, and family environment.; This project was a part of a larger longitudinal study on children's relationships with caregivers, teachers, and peers. In the course of this study, children who are now 14 years old have been followed since they were toddlers to the present date. Longitudinal data, including data on attachment and parenting style, have been collected at developmental transitions.; Sixty-two children participated in this study. The families were primarily European-American and upper middle class.; The findings indicated that secure attachment was associated with nurturance of the parents and with cohesive, organized, low-conflict family environment. Insecure attachment was associated with restrictiveness of the parents and with controlling, moral-religious family environment. Nurturance of the parents at adolescence was positively associated with cohesive, organized, low-conflict family environment, and with type of family that was high on active-recreational and intellectual-cultural orientation and high on expressiveness. Nurturance was also negatively associated with controlling, moral-religious family environment.; Children classified as secure tended to score better on various indices of social adjustment than children classified as insecure. Social adjustment was positively associated with higher nurturance and lower restrictiveness of the parents. Social adjustment was positively associated with family environment that was high on active-recreational and intellectual-cultural orientation, and high on expressiveness, and with family environment that was high on cohesiveness and organization and low on conflict. At the same time, social adjustment was negatively associated with family environment that was high on control and moral religious emphasis.; Many important indices of social adjustment, such as quality of friendship, self-reported internalizing and externalizing: problems, social anxiety, and parent reported behavior problems could be predicted by various aspects of family functioning; however, the pathways from family functioning to social adjustment for boys and girls were different.