Earned-Secure Attachment Status in Retrospect and Prospect
Roisman and colleagues tested an idea that had become popular in the attachment literature: earned security, the person who describes a difficult childhood coherently and goes on to parent well, understood as someone who was insecure as an infant and changed. Using twenty-three years of longitudinal data, they checked that assumption against what had actually been recorded at the time. It did not hold. Adults classified as earned-secure from their retrospective accounts were no more likely than continuously secure adults to have been anxiously attached as infants, and the mothering observed in their childhood and adolescence was among the most supportive and structured in a high-risk sample. In other words, the category built from adult recollection does not identify the people it was thought to identify. When security was instead defined prospectively, from actual infant classifications, those individuals did go on to succeed in close relationships, many without the depressive symptoms associated with the retrospective category. A caution about reading history backwards from a person's account of it.
Roisman and colleagues tested an idea that had become popular in the attachment literature: earned security, the person who describes a difficult childhood coherently and goes on to parent well, understood as someone who was insecure as an infant and changed. Using twenty-three years of longitudinal data, they checked that assumption against what had actually been recorded at the time. It did not hold. Adults classified as earned-secure from their retrospective accounts were no more likely than continuously secure adults to have been anxiously attached as infants, and the mothering observed in their childhood and adolescence was among the most supportive and structured in a high-risk sample. In other words, the category built from adult recollection does not identify the people it was thought to identify. When security was instead defined prospectively, from actual infant classifications, those individuals did go on to succeed in close relationships, many without the depressive symptoms associated with the retrospective category. A caution about reading history backwards from a person's account of it.
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Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). 'Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect.' Child Development, 73(4), 1204-1219. Retrospectively earned-secure adults were not more likely to have been anxiously attached as infants, and were observed in childhood to have received among the most supportive maternal parenting in the sample.
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https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00467
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00467