EARNED SECURITY, DAILY STRESS, AND PARENTING - A COMPARISON OF 5 ALTERNATIVE MODELS

Research suggests that adults who have developed a coherent perspectiv e on their negative, early attachment relationships (i.e., earned secu res) do not reenact poor parenting practices with their own children: However, no studies have addressed whether earned secures maintain pos itive parenting under the pressures of aversive environmental conditio ns. This study tested five alternative models that predict how earned secures parent under low and high stress in comparison to adults who h ad a positive upbringing (i.e., continuous secures) and adults who hav e an incoherent perspective on a troubled childhood (i.e., insecures). Only if earned secures exhibit effective caregiving under high stress , in comparison to the other security groups, can it be assumed that t hey have broken the intergenerational cycle of poor parenting. The Adu lt Attachment Interview was used to classify 97 mothers as earned secu re, continuous secure, and insecure. Home observations of parenting an d maternal self-reports of daily hassles (our stress measure) were obt ained when children were 27 months old. Planned comparisons revealed t hat the diathesis-stress/incoherent present state of mind model most a ccurately predicted parenting. Thus, under high stress, the earned sec ures parented equivalently to the continuous secures and more positive ly than the insecures; under low stress no group differences were obta ined. These findings indicate that in a normative sample earned secure s break the intergenerational cycle and exhibit resilient parenting ev en under high stress conditions.