How Childhood Relationships Affect Your Adult Attachment Style, According to a Large New Study
We come into the world screaming and vulnerable, entirely dependent on adult caregivers to keep us safe and teach us how to communicate with others. The nature of these early relationships influences how we behave toward others and view the world long after growing up, but in more complex and nuanced ways than researchers previously thought, according to findings from a large, decades-long study examining how the quality of children’s interactions with their parents and close peers influenced their relationships as adults.
In particular, early dynamics with mothers predicted future attachment styles for all major relationships in participants’ lives, including with their parents, best friends and romantic partners, the study found. “People who felt closer to and had less conflict with their mothers as children tended to feel more secure in all of their relationships as adults,” says Keely Dugan, assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study, published in October in the journal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “This is a really striking finding because it demonstrates the lasting impact of that first person who is meant to be there for you.”
Early childhood friends also played an important role in predicting how participants will approach their future close friendships and romantic relationships. “When you make your first friendships at school, that’s when you practice the give-and-take dynamic,” Dugan says. “Relationships in adulthood then reflect these dynamics.”
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The idea that early relationships have an outsized impact on our lives was popularized in psychology by Sigmund Freud. British psychiatrist John Bowlby later incorporated some fundamental Freudian elements to create attachment theory, which helps explain variations in how people approach close relationships. “Some people are completely comfortable depending on others, opening up to them, and using them as a basis of security, while others lack trust,” says co-author of the new study, R. Chris Fraley, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Researchers today define attachment styles along two dimensions, each shaped by early experiences with caregivers. The first, attachment anxiety, measures your level of confidence in the availability and responsiveness of your loved ones. People with high attachment anxiety may have more intense fears of abandonment or a need for reassurance. The second factor, attachment avoidance, involves the extent to which you feel comfortable opening up to others and depending on them for support. Highly avoided people may believe that others cannot be counted on or trusted, and therefore avoid seeking help or emotional support, even if they need it. A relationship with high attachment anxiety, avoidance, or both is defined as more insecure, while a relationship low in both attachment anxiety and avoidance is considered secure: “You feel comfortable and close to the other person, you trust them to be there for you, and you feel supported,” Dugan says.
It can be difficult to study exactly how early relationships influence attachment style, because people’s retrospective reports of what happened to them in childhood are skewed by memory defects and emotional and cognitive biases, notes Dugan. Of the few studies that have examined associations between early caregiving experiences and adult attachment styles, she adds, all have focused almost exclusively on a single early relationship: the maternal relationship.
To better understand the impact of early relationships with a wider variety of people on attachment styles, Dugan, Fraley and their colleagues turned to a landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families in the United States. It began when the children were infants and ended when they were 15 years old. Once the young participants were old enough to talk, they were asked about the quality of their relationships with their fathers, mothers and best friends. The researchers also interviewed the participants’ primary caregivers, who were mostly their mothers, and observed them interacting with their children. This study showed strong evidence that early experiences with caregivers are important for social development.
Between 2018 and 2022, 705 of the original participants, then aged 26 to 31, agreed to participate in a follow-up study aimed at collecting information about their current relationships with their parents, best friends and romantic partners. For these 705 participants, Dugan and colleagues analyzed associations between early relationship quality and later attachment styles in adulthood. They found several notable patterns. First, a person’s relationship with their mother tended to set the stage for their later attachment style in general, as well as their specific approaches to individual relationships with their friends, romantic partners, and father. For example, people who had more conflict with their mothers, were less close to their mothers, or whose mothers were apparently harsher and less warm during childhood and adolescence tend to feel more insecure in their adult relationships.
The researchers didn’t find many associations between participants’ relationships with their fathers and their future attachment styles, perhaps because most identified their mothers as their primary caregiver. “The first assessment of this cohort took place in 1991, and although the burden of care still falls heavily on mothers, fathers were even less involved at the time, on average,” says Dugan. “In cases where the father was the primary caregiver, the results could be reversed, but we do not have this data.”
However, early experiences with close friends were an even stronger predictor than maternal relationships in determining participants’ approach to, in particular, romantic relationships and friendships in adulthood. “In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends as a child, you felt more secure in your romantic and friendly relationships by age 30,” says Dugan. People who maintained increasingly close and deep friendships during their childhood and adolescence also showed significant progress in these areas as adults, she adds.
The study’s data spanning several decades is “uniquely valuable” and allowed the authors “to show, using sophisticated analyses, how early social experiences affect later adult personality and close interpersonal relationships,” says Phillip Shaver, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
Omri Gillath, a social psychologist at the University of Kansas, describes the new study as “exceptionally rigorous and methodologically sound.” The authors “provide some of the strongest prospective evidence to date supporting a fundamental hypothesis of attachment theory: that early relationship experiences shape how adults interact with others” — not only in general but also within specific types of relationships, he says.
Participants were still in early adulthood in the most recent analysis, Gillath adds, so future work could examine whether the same early childhood factors continue to have such influence throughout life and how major life transitions, such as parenthood, bereavement or divorce, might reshape these dynamics. Single-parent families, multigenerational households and same-sex couples should also be studied in future research, Dugan says. Participants in the current study were nearly 80 percent white, so greater racial and ethnic diversity is needed to get a truly representative sample, she adds.
Dugan also emphasizes that the findings do not mean that the past inexorably dictates the tone of a person’s relationships as an adult. “You are certainly not doomed,” she said. Data demonstrate that adult attachment styles can change in response to later life events and can even fluctuate from month to month in response to positive and negative relationship experiences. “These results show that attachment styles are malleable,” says Dugan. “You can have a poorer relationship with your parents while still developing a safe and healthy bond with a close friend or romantic partner as an adult.”
To this end, Dugan and colleagues are creating an interactive, research-based app to promote secure attachments in romantic relationships and adult friendships. “It starts with easy first tasks, like hugging a partner or sending an encouraging message to a friend, and then you progress from there,” she says. “There is always an opportunity to change your attachment style, and I look forward to finding the most effective, practical strategies to do just that.”
