Separation anxiety in families with emerging adults.

Abstract

In several developmental theories separation anxiety has been identified as an important feature of close interpersonal relationships. Most often, separation anxiety has been examined in the context of mother-child dyads in infancy. Increasingly, however, it is recognized that separation anxiety is also relevant in other relationships (e.g., the father-child relationship) and in later developmental periods (e.g., adolescence and emerging adulthood). The present study aimed to investigate separation anxiety at the family level in families with emerging adults. By using the Social Relations Model, we aimed to determine the extent to which the actor, the partner, their specific relationships, and the family contribute to separation anxiety in dyadic family relationships. A total of 119 Belgian two-parent families with an emerging adult participated in a round-robin design, in which family members reported on their feelings of separation anxiety towards each other. Findings showed that separation anxiety can be represented as a personality attribute (i.e., an actor effect) and as a specific feature of the mother-child dyad. Further, findings indicate that separation anxiety is also characteristic of the father-mother marital relationship and of the family climate as a whole. Implications for the meaning of separation anxiety and clinical practice are discussed.Keywords: Separation anxiety; social relations model; family relationships; emerging adulthood 3 Separation anxiety was described in early psychoanalytic writings as a basic human disposition involving concerns about the loss or absence of significant others (Benedek, 1970; Bloom-Fesbach & Bloom-Fesbach, 1987;Freud, 1926). In several theories, including attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969(Bowlby, , 1973 and object relations theory (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975), separation anxiety is considered a salient feature of close relationships. Possibly because these theories emphasized the role of separation anxiety in infancy and early interpersonal relationships, separation anxiety has been mainly studied in dyadic relationships and in the context of the mother-child dyad in particular. In this study, we investigated separation anxiety at the level of the family as a whole, thereby relying on the Social Relations Model. Moreover, we examined separation anxiety in an older target group than is typically the case, that is, families of emerging adults. As this is a time when young people make the transition to adult life and become more independent from parents (Tanner, 2006), it is believed highly relevant to investigate separation anxiety in families of emerging adults. Separation Anxiety in Family RelationshipsOn the basis of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969(Bowlby, , 1973 and object relations theory (Mahler, et al., 1975), it has been argued that processes involved in parent-child separation are critical for an individual's psychosocial development. Difficulties in processes of separation, including separation anxiety, have been described most often in the co...

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