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How You Were Raised Shapes How You Parent — The Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment

By Leon MoriguchiPublished May 15, 2026Updated May 18, 20265 min read日本語版あり
Audience
Parents of children 0–6

TL;DR

  • ·Intergenerational transmission of attachment is real and empirically established — a parent's own mental representation of attachment (measured by the Adult Attachment Interview) significantly predicts their infant's attachment classification — but the effect size is moderate, accounting for roughly 10% of variance
  • ·What predicts the next generation's attachment pattern is not whether difficult things happened but how those experiences have been processed and made sense of — narrative coherence, not valence, is the key variable
  • ·The chain is not deterministic: a difficult childhood, when it can be narrated and understood with emotional integration, becomes a point where transmission can be interrupted rather than continued

Contents

  1. Lead
  2. What intergenerational transmission of attachment means
  3. Thirty years of data recalibrate the picture
  4. The empirical case for breaking the pattern
  5. What this looks like in daily life
  6. Summary
  7. References

Lead

"Am I going to parent the way I was parented?"

Many people ask this question for the first time the moment they become a parent. Whether the memories of your own upbringing are mostly warm or carry real wounds, those memories have a way of surfacing at unexpected moments — the late-night feed, the moment you lose your patience, the first time your child's cry sounds accusatory. Why do people so often reproduce, without consciously choosing to, the patterns in which they were raised? And can that pattern be interrupted?

This is not merely a psychoanalytic intuition. Since the 1980s it has been the subject of sustained empirical investigation.

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