Anxiety is one of the common emotional problems in children. When children encounter inner conflicts and unfamiliar environments, they may experience anxious symptoms. Children's emotional problems are associated with the quality of parent-child relationship. The distress and tension that children encounter in parent-child relationships are often precursors to children's anxiety. Insecure parent-child relationship is the most important risk factor that causes child psychopathological problems. Parent-child conflict would increase children's anxiety, while parent-child relationship is affected by parents' own attachment style. Attachment styles can be intergenerational transmitted within the family. The intergenerational transmission of attachment shows that parents' early attachment experience will affect the attachment relationship with their children. Previous studies have paid more attention to the intergenerational transmission of mother-child attachment and the influence of mother-child relationship on children's anxiety, while few studies have examined the intergenerational transmission of father-child attachment and the influence of father-child relationship on children's anxiety.
Objective:
The current study aims to examine whether parents' own attachment style influences children's anxiety and whether this effect is mediated by parent-child relationship.
Methods:
This study includes two samples. The first sample (sample I) consists of 478 children aged 2-6 and their parents recruited from bilingual kindergartens in first and second-tier cities in China, which was recruited by convenience sampling during October 2018. The second sample (sample II) consists of 577 children aged 3-6 and their parents recruited from a public kindergarten in a county-level city of Yunnan Province in January 2022 recruited by convenience sampling. In order to measure Children's anxiety, mothers were asked to answer the Social Competence and Behavioral Evaluation Scale-30 (SCBE-30). Meantime, parent-child relationship was measured by asking fathers and mothers to answer the Child-Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) respectively, and parents' early attachment experience was measured by asking fathers and mothers to answer the Experience in Closed Relationship-Relationship Scale (ECR-RS) respectively. In this study, sample I was used to verify the research hypothesis, and sample II with different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds was used to replicate the results of sample I.
Result:
Sample I:
(1) There is a negative correlation between parents' early secure attachment and preschool children's anxiety, except for the father-grandmother attachment.
(2) Preschool children's anxiety is negatively correlated with parent-child conflict and positively correlated with parent-child closeness.
(3) Parents' early secure attachment is positively correlated with parent-child closeness, and negatively correlated with parent-child conflict.
(4) Mother-child relationships (closeness and conflict) mediate the influence of mother's early secure attachment on preschool children's anxiety.
(5) Father-child closeness plays a mediating role in the influence of fathers' early secure attachment on preschool children's anxiety, while father-child conflict does not.
Sample II:
(1) The correlations among parents' early secure attachment, parent-child relationship and preschool children's anxiety are also significant.
(2) We have confirmed that mother-child relationship (mother-child closeness and mother-child conflict) mediates the influence of mothers' early secure attachment on preschool children's anxiety.
(3) There is a significant positive correlation between father-child conflict and preschool children's anxiety, but there is no significant correlation between father-child closeness and preschool children's anxiety.
(4) We found that father-child conflict mediates the influence of fathers' early secure attachment on preschool children's anxiety, while father-child closeness has no such mediating effect.
Conclusion:
(1) Parents' early attachment experience has a significant influence on children's anxiety.
(2) There was significant association between parent-child relationship and children's anxiety.
(3) Mother-child closeness and mother-child conflict mediate the influence of maternal early attachment experience on children's anxiety.
(4) In the sample of first or second-tier cities, father-child closeness mediate the paternal early attachment experience on children's anxiety; while in the sample of county-level city, father-child conflict play the mediation role.
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