IMPACT OF FATHERS' ALCOHOLISM AND ASSOCIATED RISK FACTORS ON PARENT-INFANT ATTACHMENT STABILITY FROM 12 TO 18 MONTHS.

In the first year of life, an infant’s principal task is the development of an attachment to at least one primary caregiver. Attachment security is not a static, traitlike construct, and both stability and change in attachment is anticipated in attachment theory. The majority of earlier studies on attachment stability used the original attachment classifications developed by Ainsworth and Wittig (1969), and included only mother – infant dyads from middle-class, low-risk samples (e.g., Thompson, Lamb, & Estes, 1982; Waters, 1979). Calls for an increased focus on the father – infant relationship have prompted increasing study of paternal attachment relationships (Fitzgerald, Mann, & Barrett, 1999; Lamb, 1975). In addition, more recent research has expanded to include the more recently developed disorganized classification (Main & Solomon, 1990) and examine issues of stability and instability in high-risk samples. These studies have noted that instability is more characteristic of high-risk samples, especially increases in disorganized patterns of insecure attachment with increasing child age (e.g., Lyons-Ruth, Repacholi, McLeod, & Silva, 1991; Vaughn, Egeland, Sroufe, & Waters, 1979; Vondra, Hommerding, & Shaw, 1999); however, stability can be derived from secure patterns as well as insecure patterns. To date, very few studies have distinguished between these two patterns of stability and examined the possibility that infants with stable insecure attachment may display a different constellation of risk characteristics compared to infants with stable secure attachments (see Vondra et al., 1999 for an exception). Apart from rates of stability, per se, studies also have examined if changes in attachment security are a lawful process that can be explained by theoretically relevant variables. Theoretical models of parenting (Belsky, 1984; Snyder & Huntley, 1991) have emphasized the role of three sets of predictors in explaining variations in parent – child interactions and the quality of the parent – child relationship: parent characteristics, infant characteristics, and the context in which parenting takes place. The focus of this study was on explaining attachment stability, instability, or both in a sample characterized by fathers’ alcoholism. As such, the theoretical predictors of interest in this study, following the conceptual models of parenting articulated by previous researchers, included fathers’ alcoholism and associated risk characteristics in the three domains mentioned earlier. The first domain elucidated in various models of parenting is parental characteristics. In a sample characterized by fathers’ alcoholism, the primary parental characteristic of interest is fathers’ alcohol problems. Previous studies have demonstrated that mothers with alcoholic partners also tend to be heavier drinking and have more alcohol-related problems (Eiden & Leonard, 1996; Roberts & Leonard, 1997). While research on children of alcoholics has generally focused on early school age and adolescent children, infants and toddlers of alcoholics have been shown to experience more negative parenting and higher levels of insecure parent –infant attachment at 12 months (Eiden, Chavez, & Leonard, 1999; Eiden, Edwards, & Leonard, 2002). Other parental risk characteristics commonly associated with fathers’ alcohol problems, such as depression and antisocial behavior, also have been theoretically linked to parenting and the quality of the parent – child relationship (Campbell & Cohn, 1997; Eiden, et al., 1999; van den Boom, 1994). Maternal affective disorders in particular have been demonstrated to have a negative impact on the mother – infant relationship. Mothers’ depression, particularly when it is chronic or occurring in the context of family dysfunction, has been directly associated with an increased risk for insecure attachment (Carter, Garrity-Rokous, Chazan-Cohen, Little, & Briggs-Gowan, 2001; DeMulder & Radke-Yarrow, 1991; Martins & Gaffan, 2000). Much less is known about the effects of paternal depression on parenting; however, in one of the few studies examining paternal depression, fathers’ depression was found to have an indirect effect on the father – infant relationship. Specifically, paternal alcoholism was found to be associated with higher levels of paternal aggravation and decreased sensitivity in interactions with their children, an effect mediated by fathers’ depression (Eiden et al., 1999; Eiden & Leonard, 2000). While relatively little is known about the potential of antisocial behavior to influence the parent – infant relationship, Puttler, Zucker, Fitzgerald, and Bingham (1998) found that children of antisocial alcoholics had significantly more behavior problems than children of nonantisocial alcoholics as well as controls, suggesting that parental antisociality exacerbates children’s risk of maladaptive behavioral outcomes. The second domain of interest is the role of infant characteristics. It has been suggested that a biological predisposition for difficult temperament is present in infants with antisocial and alcoholic parents (see Tarter, Alterman, & Edwards, 1985; Windle, 1991), and in fact, young children of alcoholic fathers have been found to have more difficult temperaments than children of nonalcoholic fathers (Fitzgerald et al., 1993; Jansen, Fitzgerald, Ham, & Zucker, 1995). Although no direct relationship between infant temperament and attachment security has been reliably demonstrated in the literature (Bates, 1987; Sroufe, 1985), some studies have shown that the association between temperament and attachment security is mediated or moderated by maternal sensitivity during interactions (Mangelsdorf, Gunnar, Kestenbaum, Lang, & Andreas, 1990; O’Connor, Sigman, & Kasari, 1992; Susman-Stillman, Kalkose, Egeland, & Waldman, 1996; van den Boom & Hoeksma, 1994). Certainly, infant temperament influences the attachment relationship by the very nature of the reciprocity that characterizes parent – child interactions (Olson, O’Connor, & Fitzgerald, 2001). Similarly, observations of infant emotionality, while not directly predictive of attachment security, have been associated with the child’s position on the spectrum of attachment classifications, with resistant and highly aroused secure children showing more fear than both avoidant and less aroused secure children (Kochanska, 1998). The third source of influence in predicting the quality of the parent – infant relationship is the marital context. Indeed, poor marital quality has been found to be directly predictive of insecure infant attachment (Howes & Markman, 1989; Owen & Cox, 1997). Marital quality also is of relevance in studying alcoholic families because of the strong association between parental alcoholism and marital conflict (Leonard, 1993; Leonard & Quigley, 1999; Murphy & O’Farrell, 1996; Quigley & Leonard, 2000; Spaccarelli, Sandler, & Roosa, 1994). The importance of marital satisfaction as a predictor of parenting has been enumerated by models of parenting (e.g., Belsky, 1984) and may be particularly pronounced for fathers (e.g., Belsky, Fish, & Isabella, 1991; Goldberg & Easterbrooks, 1984). Keys to the development of secure attachment in Ainsworth’s (1973) original conception include parental sensitivity, acceptance, cooperation, and psychological accessibility, focusing attention on the contributions of the parent to the development of this relationship. For this reason, much of the research conducted on attachment has focused on parenting behavior, specifically parental sensitivity (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Cox, Owen, Henderson, & Margand, 1992; Eiden et al., 2002; Teti, Gelfand, Messinger, & Isabella, 1995; Volling & Belsky, 1992), and indeed, the theoretical link between parent – infant interactions and attachment security has been well validated (de Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; van IJzendoorn & de Wolff, 1997); however, researchers emphasize that this relationship is complex and the association context dependent (de Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997). Similarly, in examining changes in attachment over time, evidence indicates instability may be associated with environmental changes and may be predictable (Egeland & Farber, 1984; Vondra et al., 1999). Thus, current environment as well as previous levels of security may affect current attachment classifications. This is a particularly relevant concept when studying children of alcoholics —a population in which risk aggregates much more highly and has the potential to markedly alter attachment over time. The purpose of this study was to examine attachment stability from 12 to 18 months in a sample characterized by paternal alcoholism. A strength of the current study is that it also allows study of fathers’ parenting and attachment relationships with their infants — an often overlooked area in a literature that has largely focused its attention on maternal variables. On the basis of results with other high-risk samples, we expected increases in insecurity in general and in disorganized classification in particular from 12 to 18 months within the alcoholic group. We also examined the role of three domains of family functioning in explaining stability or changes in attachment security from 12 to 18 months. These included parental characteristics such as alcohol problems, depression, and antisocial behavior; infant characteristics such as parent reports of infant temperament and observations of infant emotionality; and the marital context (marital aggression and marital adjustment). Finally, attachment theory highlights the proximal role of parent – infant interactions in the development of infant attachment. Thus, we examined the quality of parent and infant behaviors during parent – infant interactions in explaining stability and change in attachment security.