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Attachment Ties in Military Families: Mothers’ Perception of Interactions with Their Children, Stress, and Social Competence

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Abstract

Families with deployed military parents endure substantial separations during which children and “at home” partners experience periods of drastically reduced availability from the deployed member and changes in the dynamics and relationship structure of the home. Little is known about whether deployment experiences and stressors associated with them are linked to caregivers’ ability to provide sensitive care, children’s ability to use their parents as a secure base, and children’s exchanges with others outside the home. Analyses of data based on mothers’ reports, indicate that indices of maternal caregiving quality decrease as mothers’ perceived stress increases. Similarly, maternal quality of care increases as perceived social support increases. Further, indicators of quality of maternal care were associated with children’s markers of security, and both, quality of care and security were in turn associated with children’s social competence with peers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To account for individual differences when mothers interact with their children, attachment researchers have also turned their attention to caregivers’ current conceptualizations of their own attachment relationships. Such conceptualizations have mainly been studied with the adult attachment interview (AAI). Overall, studies investigating the associations between mothers’ AAI classifications and their infants’ strange situation classifications have reported significant levels of correspondence, especially when the match is restricted to the secure-insecure distinction. Results for father-infant dyads are similar, although the levels of correspondence are not as high as those for mothers. These findings, however, do not address the issue of whether attachment representations indeed are related to individual differences in sensitive caregiving behavior; the relevant empirical literature on this issue using the AAI is more limited.

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Acknowledgments

Research reported here was supported by a grant from Sesame Workshop.

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  1. Department of Child Development and Family Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Germán Posada

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  1. Germán Posada
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  2. Nancy Longoria
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  3. Casey Cocker
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  4. Ting Lu
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Correspondence to Germán Posada .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Child Development & Family Studies, Purdue University, Gates Rd. 101, West Lafayette, 47907, Indiana, USA

    Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth

  2. Health Sciences, Dept. Medical & Clinical Psychology, Uniformed Services University of the, Jones Bridge Road 4301, Bethesda, 20814-4799, Maryland, USA

    David Riggs

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Posada, G., Longoria, N., Cocker, C., Lu, T. (2011). Attachment Ties in Military Families: Mothers’ Perception of Interactions with Their Children, Stress, and Social Competence. In: Wadsworth, S., Riggs, D. (eds) Risk and Resilience in U.S. Military Families. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7064-0_7

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