Stability of atypical caregiver behaviors over six years and associations with disorganized infant–caregiver attachment

Abstract

The present study assessed the stability of atypical caregiver behaviors over six years. The sample included 81 mother-child dyads (27 children with cystic fibrosis, 27 with congenital heart disease, and 27 healthy controls). Attachment was assessed using the Strange Situation paradigm when the child was one year old. Atypical caregiver behaviors were assessed in the Strange Situation paradigm at one year and again in a reunion episode at seven years of age using the Atypical Maternal Behavior Instrument for Assessment and Classification (AMBIANCE). Stability of atypical caregiver behaviors over six years was established. Atypical caregiver behaviors assessed when the child was one year old were related to infant-caregiver disorganized attachment and were not associated with secure infant-caregiver attachment. The current study identifies that atypical caregiver behaviors remain stable over time which suggests that they could be targeted during interventions aimed at preventing or treating disorganized child-caregiver attachment relationships and associated negative outcomes.

Factors Affecting Parent-Child Relationships One Year After Positive Newborn Screening for Cystic Fibrosis or Congenital Hypothyroidism

“…A recent study showed that sub-optimal parental caregiving observed when children were 12 months old was associated with disorganized attachment and similar parenting tended to continue into middle childhood. 58 However, Carlson and Sroufe suggest that both parental caregiving behavior and the attachment relationship are malleable at various stages of development. 59 Our findings suggest that when an infant is diagnosed with a serious medical condition, such as CF, reducing parents’ perceptions of child vulnerability and increasing their perceptions of the child’s attachment might help parents develop normative relationship with their children.…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment in Abused and Neglected Mothers: The Role of Trauma-Specific Reflective Functioning

“…These behaviors are considered to reflect an approach/avoidance conflict and the absence of an organized strategy to deal with stress, and are thought to develop as a result of parent–child interactions in which the parent's reactions evoke fear in the infant, or the infant's behaviors evoke fear in the parent (Barnett & Vondra, ; Lyons‐Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, ; Main & Hesse, ; Solomon & George, ; Tarabulsy, Larose, Pederson, & Moran, ). This places the infant in a paradoxical situation in which the person who should provide a secure base and to whom the infant instinctively turns to for comfort and protection at times of stress becomes a source of stress (Hesse & Main, ; Madigan, Voci, & Benoit, ). While the rate of infant attachment disorganization in nonclinical, middle‐class samples is relatively low (15%) (van Ijzendoorn, Schuengel, & Bakermans‐Kranenburg, ), very high rates have been reported in maltreated infants (77–90%) (Barnett, Ganiban, & Cicchetti, ; Carlson, Cicchetti, Barnett, & Braunwald, ; Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Toth, ; van IJzendoorn, ).…”

Refining the assessment of disrupted maternal communication: Using item response models to identify central indicators of disrupted behavior

“…Reliability of AMBIANCE coding at the level of the overall rating and classification has been strong across all the studies whose item-level data are included here (see original parent study publications as follows: Hobson et al, 2009;Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, 1999;Madigan et al, 2011). For the SECCYD subsample, reliability coefficients on n ¼ 62 tapes (20%) between two coders was high, with ICCs for ratings on each of the five AMBIANCE dimensions all .0.80 (Mills-Koonce et al, 2017).…”

“…In the United States, AMBIANCE indicator-level data were obtained from the Harvard Longitudinal Study, a longitudinal investigation of the effects of social risk factors on child development (n ¼ 55; Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, 1999), and from a subset of participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD; n ¼ 219; see NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005, and the study website http://secc.rti.org). In Canada, AMBIANCE data were ac-quired from a larger study of preschool behavioral problems in healthy and pediatric medical conditions (n ¼ 39; Goldberg, Gotowiec, & Simmons, 1995;Madigan et al, 2011), and in Great Britain data were acquired from a study investigating personal relatedness and attachment patterns in 12-month-old infants of mothers with and without borderline personality disorder (n ¼ 30; Hobson et al, 2009). AMBIANCE data were coded from mother-child interactions in a variety of standard interactive research paradigms, such as the Strange Situation Procedure, free play, and cleanup task, and included children from 12 months through 54 months of age (58% of children in the pooled sample were 15 months of age).…”