Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

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hHuman beings are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to step us up in difficult situations and encourage us when we shine. A popular school of psychology, known as attachment theory, suggests that these close relationships follow established patterns that vary from person to person: some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about abandonment, less willing to trust even those we hold dearest.

Now a large, new, 30-year-old study has found that our early friendships may have the biggest impact on how well we “connect” with friends and romantic partners in adulthood. If this finding is true, it would overturn the conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment style later in life. The team of researchers found that, in fact, mothers came in second place, and fathers, at least in the group studied, had little influence. The study, published in Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyFollowed 705 people and their families for three decades, starting in the 1990s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early 80s, and it entered popular discussion in the intervening decades. As the theory evolved, subsequent research revealed that our attachment style is shaped by many relationships over our lifetime, not just with our parents as Bowlby initially proposed.

But until now, few studies had experimentally tested the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory, across a person’s lifespan. To do this, Keely Dugan, assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri, and her colleagues analyzed data from a landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families that began in 1991 and lasted 15 years. They then followed 705 of the original study participants, who were now ages 26 to 31.

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Data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors videotaped mothers and fathers over time interacting with their young children and made notes about their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed parent-child conflict and closeness through parents’ reports and measured parental warmth and hostility through children’s reports. They also examined how children rated the quality of their friendships and collected teacher and parent reports about their social competence with peers.

In follow-up, Dugan and his team now evaluated attachment styles and relationship quality with adult participants, their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, maternal education, race and ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth.

Dugan and colleagues found that a person’s relationship with their mother shapes their general attachment style and their specific personal relationships with friends, romantic partners, and fathers, which accounted for 2 to 3 percent of the variance in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and cuddly during their younger years felt more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the conversation with mother, the greater its impact probably seemed. But early friendship bonds played a larger role than maternal relationships in the way people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, with adults’ romantic partner and best friend-specific attachment anxiety accounting for a 4 percent difference in anxiety, and their partner and best friend-specific avoidance varying by 10 to 11 percent.

“In general, if you had high-quality friendships in childhood and felt connected to your friends, you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugani explains. scientific American“When you have your first friendships in school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she adds, “Relationships in adulthood then reflect those dynamics,”

All the more reason to choose your school friends wisely.

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Main image: Ihnatovich Marya/Shutterstock

• kristen french

  Posted on 11 November 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor NautilusHe has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And new york magazineHe has a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University,