The Social Transmission of Parental Behavior: Attachment across Generations

TLDR

Attachment theory posits that early parent‑child relationships shape later close relationships, and recent empirical work has begun to test intergenerational continuity in parental behavior. This paper examines intergenerational continuity of attachment quality by reviewing studies on family disruption and parents’ retrospective reports of their own childhood attachments. The authors interpret these findings through the lens of Bowlby’s attachment theory and Epstein’s relational frameworks.

Abstract

The idea that an individual's childhood relationships with parents affect later close relationships, including adult love relationships and parent-child relationships, is central to Freud's developmental theory. This idea has continued to play an important role in psychoanalytic theory and is prominent in psychoanalytically oriented work (e.g., Benedek, 1949; Berger & Kennedy, 1975; Bettelheim, 1967; Fraiberg et al., 1975; Giovacchini, 1970; LaBarre, Jessner, & Ussery, 1960; Winnicott, 1965).' The view that there is intergenerational continuity in the quality of parental behavior is also explicit in Bowlby's theory of attachment (Bowlby, 1979). However, it is only very recently that empirical studies guided or influenced by attachment theory have been conducted in this area. Two bodies of research relevant to the question of intergenerational continuity of attachment quality will be presented here: studies documenting the effects of separation or disruption in the family of origin and studies in which parents reported on their childhood attachments. This research will be interpreted within a theoretical perspective derived from Bowlby (1969/ 1982b, 1973, 1980), Epstein (1973, 1976, 1979), and Epstein and Erskine (1983).