The Relationships Among Parents' Anxious and Avoidant Attachment, Emotion Dysregulation, and Parenting

Despite the conceptual assumption that attachment-related anxiety or avoidance negatively affects parenting, studies have not provided consistent evidence. Furthermore, most studies have included only mothers and focused on young children. This knowledge gap may limit family therapy practitioners' ability to address attachment-related issues effectively when working with parents. Using structural equation modeling to test an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, we examined emotion dysregulation as a mediator between adult attachment-related anxiety and avoidance style and nurturing and harsh parenting behaviors. For fathers, attachment-related anxiety was negatively related to nurturing parenting. For mothers, harsh parenting was positively associated with attachment-related avoidance. Parent's nurturing behaviors tend to increase when the other parent has higher attachment-related anxiety through the associated difficulties they experience in some ER areas. Including both mothers and fathers in the same model allowed for the identification of gender differences between parents and has important implications for research and programmatic approaches to parenting.