Parents want the very best for their baby. They put a great deal of effort into understanding what their baby needs and making sure that he or she gets it.
Things change a bit when a child turns into a teenager and becomes difficult. Now, many parents are bewildered by the behaviors they see in their teen. When did the teenager become so nervous? It turns out that the quality of the parent-infant relationship is linked to teen anxiety.
A study was done that involved 165 European-American children. These kids were from middle to upper-middle-class families. Each child was recruited for the study when he or she was four months olds. The study was done by researchers at the University of Maryland, National Institute of Mental Health, and the University of Waterloo.
When each infant was 14 months old, they were brought to a lab with their parents. The purpose was to see how the babies responded to brief separations from their parents. The researchers classified each infant as having a secure, or insecure, attachment to their parent based on this observation.
What’s the difference? Securely attached infants initiated contact with their parents upon their return. If these infants were upset, they were able to quickly calm down after their parents came back.
Infants with an insecure attachment to their parents did one of two things after their parents returned. They ignored or avoided contact with their parents. Or, they wanted to be physically close but were still very angry and unable to calm down.
Researchers had the infants and their parents return to the lab for more observations when the babies were 14, 24, 48, and 84 months old. This time, the researchers were looking at the children’s behavioral inhibitions and social reticence. Parents were asked to fill out questionnaires about their children’s behavior in new situations and when the child was with unfamiliar peers. The purpose was to determine how shy or inhibited each child was.
When the babies became 14 years old, and 17 years old, they returned to the lab with their parents. Each time, the parents filled out a questionnaire and the teens filled out their own questionnaire. The study found that children who were insecurely attached to their parents as infants – and who were also inhibited through their childhoods – ended up with higher levels of anxiety when they became teens. More specifically, those teens had social anxiety.
Many parents become worried about their teen’s behavior and try to find out the source of it. Typically, they are looking for recent events that may have caused their teen to become anxious or upset. It turns out that the initial event might be an insecure attachment to his or her parent when that teen was a baby.
Image by Katie Tegtmeyer on Flickr.
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