Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

https://nautil.us/childhood-friends-not-moms-shape-attachment-styles-most-1247316/

by dnetesn • 8 months ago

287 104 8 months ago

nautil.us

_wire_• 8 months ago

Sure, and to whom does a childhood friend first attach?

cjbarber• 8 months ago

Indeed, title should perhaps be: The parents of your kids' friends shape the attachment style of your kids

bonsai_spool2• 8 months ago

If you think this is true, why is the variance explained by the parents so low?

lordnacho• 8 months ago

But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.

Are those numbers r-squared figures? Seems like there's a lot more variance to be explained?

dash2• 8 months ago

Right. It also suggests two possibilities:

1. Maybe the measurements are just very noisy. In which case they may also have other biases. 2. Maybe there are systematic causes which the study didn't capture. If so, controlling for them might change the results.

Sigh. When I see a study headline like this I feel confident about two things. First, the study will have a weak design with no serious attention paid to causality, genetic confounding etc... second, the response to it will be full of people going "yes, that fits my N=1 anecdote" or "no that doesn't fit my N=1 anecdote", in other words, critiquing the weak methodology with an even weaker methodology (handwaving appeals to personal experience).

One reason social science is hard is there isn't much market for the truth. People just want a nice story to tell themselves.

pedalpete4• 8 months ago

My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the right frame.

I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years.

However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different.

But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.

interroboink• 8 months ago

Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this study) and applying that directly that to your specific life, or anyone else's.

I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:

"True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there".

And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people."

There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one.

Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.

pedalpete4• 8 months ago

100% agree. I actually think of attachment styles like this generally. Your upbringing does not dictate your life, it influences.

jcims• 8 months ago

Similar story here. Six schools by seventh grade. I think it does mess with you a bit.

faidit• 8 months ago

Same. The only friends that stuck around were people from the internet.

kimfc• 8 months ago

Yeah I'm the same, I think I went to nine schools by the time I went to college in the fall of 2019, most of the school changes happening in elementary school. It really does effect your ability to make friends

bsenftner• 8 months ago

Me too, 6 schools by 7th grade, with 3 city moves. I unfortunately had a stutter, which made forming friendships harder, I basically gravitated to the outcasts. And I read a shit ton; by the end of 4th grade I was finishing the entire classic section of the high school library. Reading way over my head, I joined an adult book club and had my first introductions to serious intellectual debates; which really put a distance between my same age peers and my interests. My stutter did not really get under control until my mid 20's.

cheesecompiler• 8 months ago

The family is a system, with different roles played by each participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions.

What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?

softsound• 8 months ago

Wow that explains a lot

elbear• 8 months ago

I wanted to say the same: parents don't treat all children the same. For example, I have the feeling that the first child is the "practice" child. The parents learn from the mistakes made with them and don't repeat them with the children that follow. I don't know if there's any research to back this up and yes, I am a first born.

balamatom3• 8 months ago

Remember how the modern "nucular" household is largely based on a modernization of the Roman patriarchal property distribution model, where the oldest male was ascribed the identities of all members of his household, and vice versa?

That must've been extremely efficient for legal and accounting purposes, once. But, well, the only theory of mind anyone could develop in such circumstances involves grinding minds into fine paste. (There's a reason the Stoics are "seeing" an AI-driven resurgence, even though what'd be most appropriate for their target audience is probably again Skinner.)

Remember how a great deal of how we live our "personal" lives was invented in a slaveholding state which mandated belief in gods and demons. And the rest in another.

We are taught to consider all of this legacy cultural structure in terms of "haha how quaintly did people live 1000-2000-3000 years ago, were they stupid". Yet most of it lives on in some marginally altered form due to sheer global force of habit.

Take Western human naming schemes for example: does your government permit you to change your name? do you inherit one or both granddads' names? do you get a patronym? extra personal names? are you also the security force for a place, like a Freiherr de So-and-So? and at what exact number of levels of recursive self-reflection does the word "person" stop meaning the role played, and starts meaning the human playing it?

(When you're done with "identity", continue with "time-keeping" and begin to understand another psychological phenomenon causing much suffering - people's generalized inability to discern cause and effect.)

The name - the sound through which individuals are conditioned to respond to the concepts of selfhood and identity (Foobert Barber Baznix! you come here right this instant! it is not me but you who is sleepy and hungry!) - is one of many such extremely arbitrary implementation details.

Out of those emerges the thing sold to us by our caregivers and educators as "normal life" before we are able to know any better. That's the main way "primary socialization" has ever worked: a non-consensual intergenerational transmission of habits that have as much to do with self-soothing in the face of mortality as with practical concerns; in the end they just ascribe "imaginariness" to your memories of your mind being wiped, and the "you" is ready to go.

Now, in the context of all those vague and admittedly entirely hypothetical "implementation details", proceed to imagine the troop of clothed primates not as a flat list of incidental blood relations, but as a dynamic system, a living group of conscious things; if you're feeling particularly scifi - a sort of distributed organism. What would be the purpose of the scapegoat organ in that organism? Do individual primates have an equivalent organ in their bodies? (Probably not the one you're thinking of but also a valid guess)

pedalpete4• 8 months ago

I am the scapegoat, though more commonly referred to as the black sheep.

I am not anxious, I'm the avoidant one. I don't think any of my siblings are anxious either.

shalmanese• 8 months ago

We've known roughly this since The Nurture Assumption (1998). Where parents do have an impact is in being able to choose the social circles their children are immersed in.

maxerickson• 8 months ago

The discussion of toddlers more or less code switching is quite interesting.

Once they have a sense of self, even little kids will be very careful about revealing their home life to their school friends, and the same about school to their parents.

brabel2• 8 months ago

Haha I can see myself in that. I was terrified of my mom knowing what my school social life was like as I felt terribly embarrassed that some kids made fun of me and things like that.

Terr_• 8 months ago

Potentially worrisome news for the pandemic-isolation cohort, with their outlier experience.

makeitdouble4• 8 months ago

Potentially beneficial as well, if they had less toxicity and/or had stronger family bonds than otherwise.

There's so many variable, I think we can only say they could be different, who knows if t will be for better or worse, or neither.

sishabsb• 8 months ago

While technically correct, painting these outcomes as so close to equally likely that we can’t make a call is sinister.

Locking people in their homes and away from social interactions for years amidst the background of a pandemic is almost certainly a net negative. We do similar things to violent prisoners, mentally insane, or humans we’re looking to break.

There should be an extremely high risk for the next pandemic - not just boomers/obese dying a year or two earlier - to justify what we did to the world. Years of people’s lives taken.

ivansavz• 8 months ago

Direct link to study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001

PDF: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-79270-001.pdf

DFHippie3• 8 months ago

In general your kids' friends are much more important to them in the long run than you are. You are always there, but their friends represent the society they will be sinking or swimming in. They turn away from you and your tastes and opinions for a reason: their survival depends on understanding the tastes and opinions of their peers. You will stick with them (usually). Their peers are free to abandon them. Peer relationships are fragile but important. Parent-child relationships, however important, are much more durable, so they require less attention from the child.

DFHippie3• 8 months ago

To elaborate a bit: your parenting is much more likely to affect how your kids parent their kids. And, for better or for worse, mostly what they'll be doing is avoiding the mistakes you made. Your mom was distant and judgmental? You'll be super attentive and supportive, assuming your kids need what you wanted. And quite likely you'll overshoot the mark and set up a pitfall your kids will avoid when it's their turn. And they will then overshoot the mark. The cycle of parenting. Hakuna Matata.

KerrAvon• 8 months ago

Is this anecdata/personal folklore/"common sense" or is this based on science? It sounds like the former, tbh. Things tend to be more complex than this.

kappi• 8 months ago

duplicate post of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790575

bonsai_spool2• 8 months ago

Here’s another report that speaks with the researchers directly

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-childhood-rel...

And the paper:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001

voidfunc• 8 months ago

Didn't really have friends as a kid, probably explains why I prefer the cold glow of a computer.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 8 months ago

Know what you mean

64718283661• 8 months ago

Same, so what should one do if AI ruins it? It hasn't yet. It's not good enough, but with the amount of money pouring in I think it could be cracked within 5 years. I hope not.. Coding with AI ruins the enjoyment. And willfully falling behind others using tools to be better than anyone without it isn't good either. I enjoy computers because my skill level is high enough that I can make money on my own and do what I want by using my skills to beat competitors. My research and experiments are meaningful because it is not all so trivial and instantly replicable yet.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt2• 8 months ago

Get a 6502 acorn and write assembly

Aeolun2• 8 months ago

Not sure this is generalizable. I had lots of friends as a kid. Still prefer the computer :)

makeitdouble4• 8 months ago

On the participants composition:

705 participants and their families over 3 decades, from the time participants were infants until they were approximately 30 years old (Mage = 28.6, SD = 1.2; 78.7% White, non-Hispanic, 53.6% female, 46.4% male).

It looks like an a fairly culturally homogeneous pannel, it would be interesting to also have a breakdown on religion (especially due to the communal effects) and income.

makeitdouble4• 8 months ago

From https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2026-79270-001.pdf

The income data: ------------------------------ Student status Part-time 34 (4.9%) Full-time 61 (8.7%) Employment Part-time, for pay 85 (12.1%) Full-time, for pay 516 (73.7%) Individual income <US $10,000 78 (11.1%) US $10,000–$29,999 167 (23.9%) US $30,000–$49,999 179 (25.6%) US $50,000–$99,999 213 (30.4%) US $100,000+ 63 (9.0%) Household income <US $20,000 75 (10.8%) US $20,000–$49,999 163 (23.5%) US $50,000–$99,999 248 (35.7%) US $100,000–$149,999 126 (18.1%) US $150,000+ 83 (11.9%)

djmips• 8 months ago

I've observed children who have had tremendous close friends in childhood but were unable to recreate that in adulthood. Sometimes it's easier to make friends when you're 5.

herpdyderp• 8 months ago

I'd still rather be friends with a bunch of 5 year olds. (Unfortunately everyone would probably think that's super creepy.)

kayodelycaon2• 8 months ago

It’s really sad that that’s considered creepy.

I got a lot of flak for going to a high school play in my late twenties. I had played D&D with the kid and his mom every week for years. He was great to hang out with when he was 14.

Aeolun2• 8 months ago

Kids in that age range are uncomplicated. The only thing they really desire is that you play with them. They just don’t consider anything beyond that.

But it seems hard for many adults to play with children, so it becomes this anomalous thing, even though I’m fairly certain it’s just something we’ve convinced ourselves adults “don’t do”.

Tag is still fun, whether you are 7 or 37.

0_____02• 8 months ago

There's a joke here...

Q: How do you make friends in Boston? A: Same way everyone else does. In kindergarten.

brabel2• 8 months ago

This would be very apt for Scandinavia too.

theGnuMe• 8 months ago

Minnesota as well.

Broken_Hippo• 8 months ago

Adults actually have to work at making new friends and few get any tips on how to go about doing so. I honestly didn't really get any until my late 30s or 40s - and that was mostly because I moved to Norway and for some folks, loneliness and lacking connections is a real issue.

Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of baggage and anxiety yet.

As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many, work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling, for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of course it is harder as an adult.

kayodelycaon2• 8 months ago

I think it’s a bit more general than that because I didn’t have any “childhood friends”, just bullies who were never punished.

What I did have was a great number of excellent adults in my life. In many ways, they were more my peers than anyone my own age.

Their example and support made my parents instruction significantly more effective despite the serious challenges with my mental health that they didn’t know how to handle.

taurath2• 8 months ago

No, one study doesn’t upend the last few decades of understanding of emotional attachment.

The study simply says that ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents.

This happens much later so of course it’s more predictive of the actual end effects - that’s when attachment styles actually show up for the first time. Kids grow up to be very adaptive toward their parents but when they get to the rest of society that’s when the failures of connection and the failed bids for attention show up.

A very resilient kid will do fine with friends even with a very bad attachment environment. A very sensitive kid or one with developmental problems will struggle in social environments.

parpfish• 8 months ago

One study doesn’t definitively prove anything, but this is a 30 year longitudinal analysis with 700 participants. It’s way bigger than a typical study

pfannkuchen• 8 months ago

ability to connect w friends is more predictive than observations they made of apparent attachment of parents

So for comparing studies all measuring this^, yes that’s true. But there could be a flaw in the methodology here, where their observations of parents and interpretation thereof may not be predictive even while the totality of parent behavior is.

taurath2• 8 months ago

The study itself doesn't say anything of the sort that the article title and this thread title do.

I gaurantee you that if you polled any number of therapists what people's hangups are about it would be more likely to be the parents. Everyone I know is an inheritor of some significant amount of their family's generational trauma.

Den_VR• 8 months ago

Can you link the study itself? What are the demographics of the participants like, the usual that’s clustered on one culture?

jonahx• 8 months ago

Also, even the proposed effect is modest:

But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.

Just slightly less modest that analogous parental predictors, according to their claims.

scrubs2• 8 months ago

I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. My observation is the more difficult cases of attachment in important adult relationships esp. partner/spouse is far more impacted by parents and their relationship than friends.

This doesn't gain say that in the ages of 15 to say 35 peer interactions are not there or impactful to the worse or better but extremes in the nuclear family are not to be underestimated.

hooskerdu• 8 months ago

It could be said that for any of us to think we could understand - with such a relatively short and still arguably shoddy understanding of the mind - or especially could say… is possibly insane.

puppymaster• 8 months ago

also given the psychology field research replication crisis, I would wait to see if this research can be replicated down the road.

aidenn04• 8 months ago

My own anecdotal experience matches this.

I have a (now adult) child who was diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder. She changed friends every 6 months, burning bridges behind her. She also cultivated the least-healthy friendships possible in whatever environment she found herself in.

baconbrand• 8 months ago

How is she doing now?

balamatom3• 8 months ago

What was the etiology?

popalchemist3• 8 months ago

Bingo. This kind of science reporting is the worst.

cyanydeez• 8 months ago

That history: women are to blame

standardUser• 8 months ago

It kind of makes sense. We don't go out into the world thinking "ok, time to meet more my moms!". We can't treat anyone else like our mom, and vice versa. The mother-child relationship is probably the most important and influential for most people, but it's a complete anomaly. Friends are not an anomaly, their pretty typical, and since Mom and Dad are not friends, a young child has learned very little firsthand about friendship until it happens. Then they have some experiences with those friends and those experiences become better predictors of future attachment style than the dynamic with the mother. This makes sense because in the realm of friends, these are their formative experiences. Mom may have had an impact (and does according to the study), but the bigger influence on how you deal with future friends is in how you experienced your formative friends.

em-bee• 8 months ago

i didn't start having friends until i entered university. and i spent my whole life searching for the kind of relationship that i wanted but didn't get from my parents. only a few years ago i realized that this is what i was searching for, and then i finally found it by realizing that i could be the parent to my kids that i had wanted my parents to be to me. my actual parents are more like friends to me than parents.

hopelite• 8 months ago

Are you familiar with what the understanding is that differentiates/causes (very) sensitive vs (very) resilient kids, and whether and how that can be modulated in children or even the effects of it overcome in adults?

I believe this is and will continue to be a growing issue as things like helicopter parenting and extremely anxious social dynamics, which were only exacerbated through the psychological abuse of the pandemic, starts becoming ever more dominant in society. I myself am a bit taken aback sometimes when taking to younger people and people who grew up in America specifically, and their expressed disbelief and exacerbation about totally normal things like, e.g., children walking to and from school or playing outdoors unsupervised until dusk.

I don’t know if there is a short term solution outside of individual or small group choice as long as our societies are being ravaged by a ruling class that is making everything worse and more dangerous by the day, but I find the topic both intriguing as well as sad and foreboding.

tootie• 8 months ago

I read the same conclusion in a NurtureShock published 15 years ago and they cited similar studies.

webspinner• 8 months ago

i probably spent more time at my friend's houses, than at my parents house when I was a kid!

throwattached• 8 months ago

In case this can be helpful to somebody else, I spent my ~twenties ignorant of what attachment styles were, while definitely exhibiting some very, very obvious attachment patterns. And I made a lot of mistakes, and made a lot of people close to me sad.

Reading the "Attached" book was a huge wake-up call. According to the questionnaire, for what it's worth, I was exhibiting ~100% avoidant behavior.

This led to therapy, and to a lot of atonement, and growth.

I just came here to say - if you have a minute, give it a read. And for fun, try the questionnaire:

https://archive.org/details/AttachementTheory/page/n37/mode/...

Best of luck

boje• 8 months ago

I skimmed through it. Note that this book was written right before Tinder launched (2012), which might have skewed the demographic data points found in this edition (2010). Although dating apps have definitely existed before then, that (and popular internet adoption) have by far been the most influential to society at large.

CTDOCodebases• 8 months ago

I think it just boils down to who did you experience strong emotion with and what are/were the outcomes of that relationship.

mandown2308• 8 months ago

From personal experience, I would say that's quite true.

jweir• 8 months ago

And moms are the gate keeps of their kids friends.

mvkel• 8 months ago

There's a whole book on this called "Hold On To Your Kids." It feels a little hand-wavy, categorically dismissing all social media as evil, but the core message feels right: don't stop being a parent.

iambateman• 8 months ago

They didn’t find any effect of fathers on attachment style and I’m confused…I’ve heard countless stories about how it’s hard for people to connect as adults because of how their dad was toward them.

accrual• 8 months ago

IMO in these kinds of studies you can interchange mother/father/<primary caregiver>. One can be traumatized by any caregiver regardless of gender if they're the primary adult.

benrawk• 8 months ago

The title is false, the study finds that moms have a large impact on attachment style

exe342• 8 months ago

I believe this is called the post-treatment bias. If the causal arrow goes (mother-baby) -> (child-friends) -> (adult-attachment) and you include the middle one, you have already controlled for the first, and the effect disappears. Learning about the first tells you very little more once you have learnt the second.

toxik2• 8 months ago

In statistics we call it "conditional independence", attachment style is independent from maternal relationship if we know childhood friendship outcomes.

exe342• 8 months ago

yep the book statistical rethinking puts it that way too.

reliablereason• 8 months ago

Attachment Styles is a very low dimensional way of observing something that has very high dimensionally.

When people use this type of dimensionality reduction you get problematic outcomes.

This type of phenomena will always keep happening. The world is complex and perceptually high dimensional. We try to understand it(the world) using low dimensional concepts and when those low dimensional concepts have low validity issues arise.

lkbm• 8 months ago

From the study abstract:

Early levels of mother–child relationship quality predicted individual differences in general attachment anxiety and avoidance in adulthood, as well as adults’ relationship-specific attachment orientations in each of their close relationships, including with their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and best friends (median R² = 3% for attachment anxiety and avoidance across relationship domains).[0]

Hmmm...

[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-79270-001

biff1• 8 months ago

Since the 60’s people have wanted to revise the nurture side of psychology to downplay the role of mothers, but the reality is as everyone has always known, it is the mothers. Sure, there’s also biology and trauma. But Iften the trauma is related to interaction with the parents. Also, biology is shared most of the time by the parent, so bipolar mothers tend to have bipolar children.

Anyway, people have mothers before they have friends. Our first relationships become a template for subsequent ones. I feel embarrassed for the authors and the field more generally that such an obvious fact is not obvious enough to prevent absurd claims. As with most things in our society, blame the 60’s and all that came from it.

jamesalvarez• 8 months ago

The Nautil.us article misrepresents the findings of the paper, suggesting that it said anything about a causal effect. The title 'Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most' is completely inacurrate and not even hinted at by the study authors in the paper.

popalchemist3• 8 months ago

The science on parental influence is well documented. This research may be onto something new - an additional layer of influence. But the personality begins to be formed by extrinsic influences within months of being born. Which is to say, it precedes the stage at which you have the ability to make friends.

The relevant research is called "The Strange Situation" by Beebe. The research spanned decades with the same subjects. The universal predictor of adulthood outcomes (relationships, lifestyle, income, drug use, etc) was whether the mother was attentive and capable of attuning to the child.

dboreham• 8 months ago

Obviously it's the sum of all training data, so comes from the available sources. Typically that would mostly be the mother but it depends.

popalchemist3• 8 months ago

Incorrect assumption, we do not remain equally plastic / malleable in all domains across the entirety of our life. Attachment style crystallizes around 18 months. Trauma can re-open the issue later in life, but the personality builds in layers, with relationship to primary caretaker (usually mom) being a cornerstone.

tehjoker• 8 months ago

am i reading this right that the effect size is 4%? how does this say anything?

pessimizer• 8 months ago

Wouldn't they, if you limited the study to the last 30 years during which mothers barely got to see their kids because of work? If you check 30 years from now it will be "Favorite Video Games and Internet Personalities, Not Childhood Friends, Shape Attachment Styles Most"

Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

Related Stories