Attachment style can influence the number of children people have

The decision whether or not to have children is a deeply personal decision, so personal that it can be influenced by the attachment style a person developed during their own childhood. Attachment styles are psychological frameworks that form during the first years of life and are based on the quality of interactions with primary caregivers; research suggests that they influence our relationships with our friends, parents and partners throughout life.

Generally 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 have been reliably met by caregivers, and as a result, they have trust in their closest relationships. The other three categories are insecure attachment types: People with these attachment styles tend to have difficulty with trust and intimacy due to rejection or inconsistent satisfaction of their early needs.

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 have a few more children than those with secure attachment styles. The results, although not definitive, suggest that people with these insecure attachments may compensate for their attachment by having more children.

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According to co-author T. Joel Wade, a psychology professor at Bucknell University, these findings are intuitive because low-attachment people tend to have difficulty forming lasting bonds with others. “They might think, ‘Even if my partner leaves me, I won’t be alone because I will have a relationship with a child.'”

This interpretation is “theoretically reasonable,” says Lisa Welling, a psychology professor at Oakland University who was not involved in the research. “Fearfully attached people may have 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 company to administer an online survey to 15,120 participants spread equally across Japan, Canada and the United States. The survey included measures identifying participants’ attachment styles, as well as questions about how many children they wanted and how many children they already had.

Across the sample, those with insecure attachments reported wanting slightly larger families than those with stable attachments, and insecure attachment was also modestly associated with having more children. This finding was particularly true for people with fearful and preoccupied attachment styles, two subtypes of insecure attachment associated with a need for intimacy but, respectively, a deep fear of it or a fear of rejection and abandonment. When aggregated, these effects were small but significant; However, when broken down by country, the associations become weaker. Still, “the sample size is very large, so statistically significant results can emerge even when practical effects are small,” Welling says.

Conversely, having a secure attachment style was linked to having fewer children. This trend was only observed in populations from the United States and Canada; in Japan, researchers found no relationship between secure attachment and number of children. Wade suspects that social norms could explain these differences, with Japanese couples perhaps feeling more pressure to have children than those in more individualistic Western countries like the United States 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 results 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.”