The Interplay Between Parental Beliefs about Children’s Emotions and Parental Stress Impacts Children’s Attachment Security

Secure attachment is thought to provide children with a close emotional relationship and a secure base from which to explore their environment (Ainsworth, 1979). Through this relationship children also develop a mental schema of their self, their attachment figure, and relationships in general (Ainsworth, 1979; Bowlby, 1980). The importance of children’s sense of security in relationships with parents has been demonstrated in a myriad of studies investigating cognitive, emotional, and social development (e.g. Allen, Porter, McFarland, McElhaney, & Marsh, 2007; Cassidy, 1994; Diener, Isabella, Behunin, & Wong, 2008; Kerns & Richardson, 2005; McQuaid, Bigelow, McLaughlin, & MacLean, 2008). Emotion is central to parenting (Dix, 1991) and researchers in the fields of attachment (e.g. Bretherton, 1990) and emotion (e.g. Tomkins, 1962; 1963) have consistently identified how these two constructs are inextricably linked. The organization of the attachment relationship begins in infancy, when caregivers’ emotion-related behaviors including expressiveness, warmth, responsiveness, and sensitivity to distress are powerful predictors of children’s attachment security (e,g, Ainsworth, 1979; Bowlby, 1980; Laible, 2006; McElwain & Booth-LaForce, 2006). In middle childhood, the attachment relationship is somewhat different, in part due to children seeking more autonomy from their parents (Allen & Land, 1999), their increasingly complex understanding of the self (Harter, 1999), and more advanced emotion understanding and regulation (Murphy, Eisenberg, Fabes, Shepard & Guthrie, 1999; Saarni, 1999). Nevertheless, children’s perceptions of their parents as emotionally available, open to communication about emotions, and responsive to their emotions continues to be important (Bowlby, 1980; Bretherton, 1985; 1990; Cassidy, 1994; De Wolff & van IJzendoorn 1997; Kerns & Richardson, 2005), with children in middle childhood choosing parent attachment figures over peers to help them deal with negative emotions (Kerns, Tomich, & Kim, 2006). Although children in middle childhood continue to rely on and benefit from parents’ emotion-related support, parents of children at this age vary in how much they accept and value their children’s emotions (Dunsmore, Her, Halberstadt, & Perez-Rivera, 2009). Given the importance of parents’ responsiveness to children’s emotions, parents who have core beliefs that children’s emotions are of value are likely to have children who report greater attachment security. Indeed, parental beliefs about children’s emotion are thought to play a central role in guiding parental behaviors (Dix, 1991; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad 1998; Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1996; Parke & McDowell, 1998; Parker et al., 2010), which, in turn, are thought to be associated with important emotion-related outcomes for children (Dix, 1991; Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997; Eisenberg et al.1998; Gottman et al., 1996). Theory and evidence described below supports the notion that parental beliefs about emotion may well initiate the relationship between parents’ emotion socialization behaviors and children’s attachment security (Dunsmore & Halberstadt, 1997). Thus, the current study took the first step of assessing parental beliefs as a possible avenue for understanding the family socialization environment that influences children’s attachment security.