Romantic Attachment Styles, Harsh Parenting Behavior, and Children's Emotional Reactivity: A Process Model

This study examined whether parenting behavior serves as an intervening mechanism in accounting for associations between romantic attachment styles and children's emotional reactivity (i.e., anger and distress reactivity). Participants included 235 mothers (62% White) and a preschool-aged child (M_age = 2.97; 55% female) recruited from a moderate-sized city in the northeastern United States. Families visited the laboratory at two measurement occasions spaced approximately one year apart. At the first measurement occasion, mothers provided self-reports of their romantic attachment style and participated in three different parent-child interaction tasks. Ratings of harsh parenting were coded from each of the three tasks. From these ratings, a coefficient of variation score was used to assess the mother's inconsistent harsh parenting across the three tasks, and we also computed the mean of harsh parenting across the three tasks. Observational ratings of children's anger and distress reactivity were coded from two tasks designed to elicit children's negative emotion. Results of structural equation model analyses revealed that romantic attachment anxiety was associated with inconsistent harsh parenting across the three parenting tasks. In turn, inconsistent harsh parenting was associated with increases in children's anger reactivity one year later. Romantic attachment avoidance was associated with higher average levels of harsh parenting across the parenting tasks. However, average levels of harsh parenting were not associated with children's emotional reactivity. Findings provide partial evidence that parenting behavior serves as an intervening mechanism in explaining associations between romantic attachment styles and children's emotional reactivity.