Early Parenting and Infant-Parent Attachment: Developmental Origins of Psychotic Experiences

The infant-parent relationship is theorized to be related to the origins of psychotic experiences, given the key role of infant-parent attachment and early-life caregiving in children's neurodevelopmental trajectories. Yet, the magnitude of this association is not well understood, and research is often based on self-reports. We examined the relationship of disconnected and extremely insensitive parenting and disorganized infant attachment with the occurrence of psychotic experiences in childhood and adolescence. We additionally examined the role of maternal experiences of loss, a hypothesized antecedent of disconnected parenting, disorganized attachment, and psychotic experiences.

This prospective study (N = 627) is embedded in the Generation R Study. Maternal experiences of loss within 2 years of the child's birth were self-reported. Parenting behaviors (based on continuous scores) and the infant-parent attachment were observed when infants were 14 months old. Psychotic experiences were self-reported via questionnaires at ages 10 and 14 years. We used a structural equation model adjusted for covariates to assess the association between maternal loss experiences, parenting behaviors, infant disorganized attachment, and psychotic experiences.

Extreme insensitive parenting was associated with more hallucinations and delusions at age 14 years (hallucinations OR = 1.34, 95% CI = 1.07-1.66; delusions OR = 1.31, 95% CI = 1.02-1.68). Disorganized infant attachment and disconnected parenting were not related to psychotic experiences. Maternal experiences of loss were not associated with psychotic experiences, and we found no evidence for a pathway between maternal experiences of loss, parenting behaviors, or disorganized attachment, and subsequent psychotic experiences.

This study suggests that the role of disorganized infant-parent attachment in the risk of psychotic experiences of children from the general population might be smaller than expected. Instead, our results suggest that adverse caregiving behaviors related to harsh and maltreating parenting very early in development may predict psychotic experiences in adolescence.