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Attachment to Parents and Well-Being After High School Graduation: A Study Using Self- and Parent Ratings

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Abstract

Parental attachment is associated with well-being in early emerging adulthood. The present study is the first to measure attachment from multiple perspectives by obtaining attachment ratings from both children and parents, allowing us to examine discrepancies between both attachments in the relationship and the association of those discrepancies with well-being. We used a large sample of 558 young emerging adults and 405 parents to assess self- and parent ratings of different facets of attachment and well-being. Using 15 structural equation models, we were able to show that security, trust, communication, and relatedness (but not dependency) are associated with the emerging adult’s subjective happiness, life satisfaction, and psychological flourishing. Moreover, psychological flourishing was higher for adult children whose parents were more attached to them than would be expected on basis of the child’s attachment.

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Acknowldgements

We are grateful to Jana Stein and Caterina Betz for their assistance in data collection and Esther Ulitzsch for creating graphs and providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft. We also thank Lisa Trierweiler for her writing support.

Funding

The study was founded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grand Number EI379/6-2) to Prof. Michael Eid.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Johannes Bohn, Jana Holtmann & Michael Eid

  2. Department of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Maike Luhmann

  3. Psychologische Hochschule Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Koch

Authors
  1. Johannes Bohn
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  2. Jana Holtmann
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  3. Maike Luhmann
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  4. Tobias Koch
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  5. Michael Eid
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Correspondence to Johannes Bohn.

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The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding this study.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the ethics committee of the Freie Universität Berlin (date of the evaluation: 13.06.2013) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

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Table 4 Means and Standard Deviations of all employed scales in the mother and the father group
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Appendix 2

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Table 5 Model Fit of the 15 final models
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Bohn, J., Holtmann, J., Luhmann, M. et al. Attachment to Parents and Well-Being After High School Graduation: A Study Using Self- and Parent Ratings. J Happiness Stud 21, 2493–2525 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-019-00190-y

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