Healthy attachment for the parents? An investigation on the association between attachment parenting and parental mental health.
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Introduction. Attachment parenting (AP) became popular for it promotes responsive caregiving, but has been criticized for over-extensively translating attachment research into challenging parenting standards, mirroring detrimental intensive-parenting beliefs that adversely affect parental health. Meanwhile, evidence on AP remains limited and assessments of AP-beliefs and AP-practice are lacking. This study aims to develop and validate an AP-questionnaire and test the associations between AP and parental mental health and explore the mediating role of intensive-parenting beliefs.Methods. In a preregistered cross-sectional online-survey, 1664 parents (98.5% mothers) of children aged up to six years answered an extensive item-list assessing AP-beliefs and AP implementation into practice, an intensive parenting questionnaire, and mental health measures. Confirmatory factor analyses were used for AP-questionnaire validation and correlation- and mediation-analyses for exploring the association between AP and mental health.Results. A 26-item AP-questionnaire was extracted that assesses AP-beliefs and AP- practice, both for the global AP-approach and seven individual core-principles. AP-indicators consistently showed small/minimal correlations with better mental health, whereas mediation analyses revealed parallel, opposing pathways: a positive, direct association from AP to mental health (possibly explained via parental fulfilment) and adverse indirect pathways through intensive-parenting beliefs (challenge-/self-sacrifice and essentialist-beliefs).Conclusion. AP may be neither uniformly beneficial nor harmful. Rather, it can foster parental fulfilment which increases parental well-being, but also instil dysfunctional beliefs about sacrifice and unavoidable strain that increase parental-stress. To improve evidence-based personalized parenting-recommendations, longitudinal research is needed to disentangle when AP fosters positive parental identity and when it reinforces parental vulnerabilities.
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213542640