Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most
nautil.us
nautil.us
The study simply says that ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents.
This happens much later so of course it’s more predictive of the actual end effects - that’s when attachment styles actually show up for the first time. Kids grow up to be very adaptive toward their parents but when they get to the rest of society that’s when the failures of connection and the failed bids for attention show up.
A very resilient kid will do fine with friends even with a very bad attachment environment. A very sensitive kid or one with developmental problems will struggle in social environments.
So for comparing studies all measuring this^, yes that’s true. But there could be a flaw in the methodology here, where their observations of parents and interpretation thereof may not be predictive even while the totality of parent behavior is.
I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.
I think he did a great job when I was younger, but we haven't maintained a strong bond as adults (which is my fault as much as anything); something I want to try and change with my own children.
Bad parents but good early friendships=turn out ok=don't show up in the data. Bad parents and bad early friendships = have it rough, show up in the data. The parents are the cause but the correlation to early friendships is even stronger because of the mediating effect.
I completely agree.
The study looked at “individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships” - each quantified. Of course, the study isn’t about the source of trauma, but I don’t think you can quantify any of these things - the source of trauma, the source of anxiety, or the source of attachment styles.
Imagine you have a very frugal parent. Maybe that early influence makes you a big spender. Maybe it makes you cheap. Maybe you spend normally, but you’re always anxious about not having enough. The same goes for other parental influence, good or bad. How does something like that show up on a chart? You can’t quantify it and you can’t generalize it.
That said: I do think your early friendships and early relationships are full of useful hints. There are a lot of things caused by your parents that might be camouflaged (e.x. because the parents are older) that your own early friendships and relationships reveal.
> But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.
Just slightly less modest that analogous parental predictors, according to their claims.
This doesn't gain say that in the ages of 15 to say 35 peer interactions are not there or impactful to the worse or better but extremes in the nuclear family are not to be underestimated.
Attachment modalities as far as I can see describes some human dynamics.
I have a (now adult) child who was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder. She changed friends every 6 months, burning bridges behind her. She also cultivated the least-healthy friendships possible in whatever environment she found herself in.
I believe this is and will continue to be a growing issue as things like helicopter parenting and extremely anxious social dynamics, which were only exacerbated through the psychological abuse of the pandemic, starts becoming ever more dominant in society. I myself am a bit taken aback sometimes when taking to younger people and people who grew up in America specifically, and their expressed disbelief and exacerbation about totally normal things like, e.g., children walking to and from school or playing outdoors unsupervised until dusk.
I don’t know if there is a short term solution outside of individual or small group choice as long as our societies are being ravaged by a ruling class that is making everything worse and more dangerous by the day, but I find the topic both intriguing as well as sad and foreboding.
I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years.
However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different.
But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.
I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:
"True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there".
And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people."
There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one.
Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.
I went from moving around a bunch, and making new friends at each place, to living in Whistler, BC, where you've got an annual turnover of new people, then I settled down in Bondi Beach, Australia, which doesn't have the turnover of Whistler, but not far off.
What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?
That must've been extremely efficient for legal and accounting purposes, once. But, well, the only theory of mind anyone could develop in such circumstances involves grinding minds into fine paste. (There's a reason the Stoics are "seeing" an AI-driven resurgence, even though what'd be most appropriate for their target audience is probably again Skinner.)
Remember how a great deal of how we live our "personal" lives was invented in a slaveholding state which mandated belief in gods and demons. And the rest in another.
We are taught to consider all of this legacy cultural structure in terms of "haha how quaintly did people live 1000-2000-3000 years ago, were they stupid". Yet most of it lives on in some marginally altered form due to sheer global force of habit.
Take Western human naming schemes for example: does your government permit you to change your name? do you inherit one or both granddads' names? do you get a patronym? extra personal names? are you also the security force for a place, like a Freiherr de So-and-So? and at what exact number of levels of recursive self-reflection does the word "person" stop meaning the role played, and starts meaning the human playing it?
(When you're done with "identity", continue with "time-keeping" and begin to understand another psychological phenomenon causing much suffering - people's generalized inability to discern cause and effect.)
The name - the sound through which individuals are conditioned to respond to the concepts of selfhood and identity (Foobert Barber Baznix! you come here right this instant! it is not me but you who is sleepy and hungry!) - is one of many such extremely arbitrary implementation details.
Out of those emerges the thing sold to us by our caregivers and educators as "normal life" before we are able to know any better. That's the main way "primary socialization" has ever worked: a non-consensual intergenerational transmission of habits that have as much to do with self-soothing in the face of mortality as with practical concerns; in the end they just ascribe "imaginariness" to your memories of your mind being wiped, and the "you" is ready to go.
Now, in the context of all those vague and admittedly entirely hypothetical "implementation details", proceed to imagine the troop of clothed primates not as a flat list of incidental blood relations, but as a dynamic system, a living group of conscious things; if you're feeling particularly scifi - a sort of distributed organism. What would be the purpose of the scapegoat organ in that organism? Do individual primates have an equivalent organ in their bodies? (Probably not the one you're thinking of but also a valid guess)
Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that they have perfect foresight and know the configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know everything you don't know yet.
People have the same belief with regards to natural selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the most efficient organisms.
In reality there is a developmental process with no guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes activation energy to get out of it.
The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership does not have a complete picture of the problems that its people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.
I am not anxious, I'm the avoidant one. I don't think any of my siblings are anxious either.
Are those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot more variance to be explained?
1. Maybe the measurements are just very noisy. In which case they may also have other biases. 2. Maybe there are systematic causes which the study didn't capture. If so, controlling for them might change the results.
Sigh. When I see a study headline like this I feel confident about two things. First, the study will have a weak design with no serious attention paid to causality, genetic confounding etc... second, the response to it will be full of people going "yes, that fits my N=1 anecdote" or "no that doesn't fit my N=1 anecdote", in other words, critiquing the weak methodology with an even weaker methodology (handwaving appeals to personal experience).
One reason social science is hard is there isn't much market for the truth. People just want a nice story to tell themselves.
I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he was 14.
But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just something we’ve convinced ourselves adults “don’t do”.
Tag is still fun, whether you are 7 or 37.
Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else does. In kindergarten.
"We've got two seasons: summer and construction" - do you have that one too?
Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of baggage and anxiety yet.
As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many, work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling, for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of course it is harder as an adult.
The relevant research is called "The Strange Situation" by Beebe. The research spanned decades with the same subjects. The universal predictor of adulthood outcomes (relationships, lifestyle, income, drug use, etc) was whether the mother was attentive and capable of attuning to the child.
And yes, sure, it's more complicated than that. It's always more complicated. It's unlikely the final word on any topic will fit in an HN comment.
What I did have was a great number of excellent adults in my life. In many ways, they were more my peers than anyone my own age.
Their example and support made my parents instruction significantly more effective despite the serious challenges with my mental health that they didn’t know how to handle.
> 705 participants and their families over 3 decades, from the time participants were infants until they were approximately 30 years old (Mage = 28.6, SD = 1.2; 78.7% White, non-Hispanic, 53.6% female, 46.4% male).
It looks like an a fairly culturally homogeneous pannel, it would be interesting to also have a breakdown on religion (especially due to the communal effects) and income.
The income data: ------------------------------ Student status Part-time 34 (4.9%) Full-time 61 (8.7%) Employment Part-time, for pay 85 (12.1%) Full-time, for pay 516 (73.7%) Individual income <US $10,000 78 (11.1%) US $10,000–$29,999 167 (23.9%) US $30,000–$49,999 179 (25.6%) US $50,000–$99,999 213 (30.4%) US $100,000+ 63 (9.0%) Household income <US $20,000 75 (10.8%) US $20,000–$49,999 163 (23.5%) US $50,000–$99,999 248 (35.7%) US $100,000–$149,999 126 (18.1%) US $150,000+ 83 (11.9%)
Anyway, people have mothers before they have friends. Our first relationships become a template for subsequent ones. I feel embarrassed for the authors and the field more generally that such an obvious fact is not obvious enough to prevent absurd claims. As with most things in our society, blame the 60’s and all that came from it.
Reading the "Attached" book was a huge wake-up call. According to the questionnaire, for what it's worth, I was exhibiting ~100% avoidant behavior.
This led to therapy, and to a lot of atonement, and growth.
I just came here to say - if you have a minute, give it a read. And for fun, try the questionnaire:
https://archive.org/details/AttachementTheory/page/n37/mode/...
Best of luck
> Early levels of mother–child relationship quality predicted individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships, including with their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and best friends (median R² = 3% for attachment anxiety and avoidance across relationship domains).[0]
Hmmm...
Once they have a sense of self, even little kids will be very careful about revealing their home life to their school friends, and the same about school to their parents.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-childhood-rel...
And the paper:
When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.
This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.
There's so many variable, I think we can only say they could be different, who knows if t will be for better or worse, or neither.
Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.
There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to justify what we did to the world. Years of people’s lives taken.
That perception of prisons and mental wards is fundamentally broken IMHO. Perhaps that's how it's run in most of the US, but the base principal is reeducation and reform, not punishment.
The core idea is to lock people away because keeping them around is a net negative, and bringing them back to society so they can reintegrate.
Which is modeled after the educational system, because prisons is supposed to be reeducation, if you want to draw parallels.
> Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years
Did any country do that or intent to ? We had strict lockdowns and it was for weeks at most, with social interactions still allowed but at reduced scope (limiting the contact radius to a minimum of 10~15km or so)
China famously was more heavy handed and the most it lasted was two month.
> so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.
Humans are complex, and it rarely works the way we envision it, especially when it comes to social phenomenons. Think about the opposite natural experiment: people who can't go home and stay in a shelter and have to interact with hundreds of people for weeks. This is also an extremely traumatic event that countries with frequent natural disasters are working hard at solving.