Maternal Attachment Style and Responses to Adolescents' Negative Emotions: The Mediating Role of Maternal Emotion Regulation.

OBJECTIVE

Previous research has examined the developmental consequences, particularly in early childhood, of parents' supportive and unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions. Much less is known about factors that explain parents respond in ways that may support or undermine their children's emotions, and even less is known about how these parenting processes unfold with adolescents. We examined the associations between mothers' attachment styles and their distress, harsh, and supportive responses to their adolescents' negative emotions two years later and whether these links were mediated by maternal emotion regulation difficulties.

DESIGN

Mothers in a longitudinal study ( = 230) reported on their attachment style, difficulties regulating their emotions, and their hypothetical responses to their adolescents' negative emotions, respectively, at consecutive laboratory visits one year apart.

RESULTS

Mothers who reported greater attachment-related avoidance and anxiety reported having greater difficulties with emotion regulation one year later. Emotion dysregulation, in turn, predicted more distressed, harsher, and less supportive maternal responses to adolescents' negative emotions the following year. In addition, greater avoidance directly predicted harsher maternal responses two years later.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings extend previous research by identifying maternal attachment style as a predictor of responses to adolescent distress and by documenting the underlying role of emotion dysregulation in the link between adult attachment style and parenting.