Intergenerational Transmission Of Parent-child Attachment

Attachment is a strong emotional bond established by human beings to a specific person.It is generally described as a variety of emotional and psychological connections between children and primary caregivers,which play a broad and sustainable role in children’s physical and mental development.Studies have shown that there is an intergenerational transmission of attachment.Based on Bowlby’s attachment theory and George et al.’s adult attachment theory,this study examined the intergenerational transmission mechanism of parental attachment to junior high school students.The parents’ marital quality and parenting style were regarded as the mediators of attachment transmission,so as to construct a chain mediator model of intergenerational attachment transmission.This study is divided into the following two parts: In Study 1,800 students and their parents were randomly selected from Grade 7 to Grade 9 of five high schools in Xi ’an,Shaanxi Province as the initial test subjects,and the adult attachment questionnaire(AAQ3.1)translated by Li Feiming et al was used to analyze the relationship between parents’ and children’s attachment.From the perspective of intergenerational transmission,this study explores how attachment representations of parents’ early experiences affect their marital quality and parenting style to their offspring.The results showed that there was a significant correlation between children and parental attachment,and parental attachment significantly predicted children’s attachment,among which parental marital quality and parenting style played a partial mediating role in the intergenerational transmission of attachment.The second study adopted the research method of qualitative analysis and conducted in-depth interviews with the parents of 6 junior high school students with a semi-structured interview outline.The grounded theory was used to conduct qualitative analysis on the interview text data.The results are as follows: the marital quality of parents is affected by their adult attachment status,and the parents with good adult attachment status have higher marital quality;Parents’ parenting style is influenced by their adult attachment status.Parents with good adult attachment status are more active in their parenting style to their children.Parents with more harmonious marriage relationship are more active in their parenting style to their children.