The decision of whether to have children is a deeply personal one—so personal that it may be influenced by the attachment style someone develops in their own childhood. Attachment styles are psychological frameworks that form in the first years of life based on the quality of interactions with primary caregivers; research suggests that they influence how we relate to friends, parents and partners throughout life.
Broadly speaking, psychologists recognize four different attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious/preoccupied attachment, avoidant/dismissive attachment and disorganized/fearful attachment. According to attachment theory, securely attached people’s needs were reliably met by caregivers, and as a result, they have confidence in their closest relationships. The other three categories are types of insecure attachment: people with these attachment styles tend to have difficulties with trust and intimacy as a result of their early needs being rejected or inconsistently met.
A study published in April in the International Journal of Psychology found that people who have fearful or preoccupied attachment styles tend to want and to have slightly more children than those with secure attachment styles. The findings, while not definitive, suggest that people with these insecure attachments could be compensating for their attachment by having more children.
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According to co-author T. Joel Wade, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, these findings make intuitive sense because insecurely attached people tend to struggle to form lasting bonds with others. “They might think, ‘Even if my partner leaves me, I’m not going to be alone because I’ll have a relationship with a child.’”
This interpretation is “theoretically sensible,” says Lisa Welling, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who was not involved in the research. “Fearfully attached individuals may be having children in part to feel more secure in their relationships or to forge stronger bonds through their children,” she says.
Wade and his colleagues used a research firm to administer an online survey to 15,120 participants equally divided across Japan, Canada and the U.S. The survey included measures that identified the participants’ attachment styles, as well as questions about how many children they desired and how many children they already had.
Across the full sample, those with insecure attachments reported wanting slightly larger families than those with secure ones, and insecure attachment was likewise modestly associated with having more children. This finding specifically held true for people with fearful and preoccupied attachment styles, two subtypes of insecure attachment associated with a craving for intimacy but, respectively, a deep fear of it or a fear of rejection and abandonment. When pooled, these effects were small but significant; when broken out by individual countries, however, the associations grew weaker. Still, “the sample size is very large, so statistically significant findings can emerge even when the practical effects are small,” Welling says.
Conversely, having a secure attachment style was linked with having fewer children. The trend was only seen in populations in the U.S. and Canada; in Japan, the researchers found no relationship between secure attachment and number of children. Wade suspects that social norms might explain these differences, with couples in Japan possibly feeling more pressure to have children than those in more individualistic Western countries such as the U.S. and Canada. “Culture can be a moderating factor,” Wade says.
Welling notes that the study was based on a one-time online survey and that the findings need to be replicated with future research—but overall, she says, the authors provide “a solid foundation for what I hope will be a growing area of investigation.”
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