Joint custody? Overnights away from home affect children's attachments

Babies have an innate biological need to be attached to caregivers. Attachments during that critical first year serve as the basis for healthy attachments and relationships later in life. 

Credit: © Konstantin Yuganov / Fotolia

But what happens when babies spend a night or more per week away from a primary caregiver, as increasingly happens in cases where the parents share custody, but do not live together?

In a new national study, University of Virginia researchers found that infants who spent at least one night per week away from their mothers had more insecure attachments to the mother compared to babies who had fewer overnights or saw their fathers only during the day.

The finding is reported in the August edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Attachments are defined as an enduring, deep, emotional connection between an infant and caregiver that develops within the child's first year of life, according to Samantha Tornello, the study's lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in psychology in U.Va.'s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Samantha Tornello

Attachments during that critical first year serve as the basis for healthy attachments and relationships later in life, including adulthood, Tornello said.

She notes that growing numbers of parents are living apart due to non-marital childbirth, the breakup of co-habitating parents, separation and divorce.

Parents increasingly are choosing to share child rearing in some form of joint custody, and often the legal system must determine custody arrangements for the children of parents who do not live together.

"Judges often find themselves making decisions regarding custody without knowing what actually may be in the best interest of the child, based on psychology research," Tornello said.

"Our study raises the question, 'Would babies be better off spending their overnights with a single caregiver, or at least less frequently in another home?'"

Tornello pointed out that either the mother or father could be the primary caregiver, but the point would be that the child ideally would be in the care each night of a loving and attentive caregiver and that there may be something disruptive about an infant spending nights in different homes.

"We would want a child to be attached to both parents, but in the case of separation a child should have at least one good secure attachment," she said. "It's about having constant caregivers that's important."

Tornello and her co-authors at U.Va. and the American Institutes for Research, including U.Va. psychology professor Robert Emery, analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a national longitudinal study of about 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities from 1998 to 2000.

Robert Emery

The data was collected by researchers at Princeton University and Columbia University and consisted of interviews with both parents at the time of the child's birth, and at ages 1 and 3.

Additional in-home assessments of the children were conducted when they were 1 and 3.

Of parents who were not cohabiting at the time of the study, 6.9 percent of babies under the age of 1 and who lived primarily with their mother spent at least one overnight a week away with their father.

Among toddlers ages 1 to 3, 5.3 percent spent between 1 percent and 35 percent of overnights away with their fathers. Another 6.8 percent spent 35 percent to 70 percent of overnights with their fathers.

Infants who spent at least one overnight a week away from their mothers were discovered to have more insecure attachments to them compared to babies who had fewer overnights or stayed with their father only during the day.

Forty-three percent of babies with weekly overnights were insecurely attached to their mothers, compared to 16 percent with less frequent overnights.

In the case of toddlers the findings were less dramatic; greater attachment insecurity was linked to more frequent overnights, but the findings there were not statistically reliable, Tornello said.

"I would like infants and toddlers to be securely attached to two parents, but I am more worried about them being securely attached to zero parents," said Emery, Tornello's research adviser.

He advocates parenting plans that evolve, where day contact with fathers occurs frequently and regularly, and overnights away from the primary caregiver are minimized in the early years, then are gradually increased to perhaps become equal in the preschool years.

"If mothers and fathers can be patient, cooperate and take a long view of child development, such evolving plans can work for both children and parents," he said.

Journal Reference: Samantha L. Tornello, Robert Emery, Jenna Rowen, Daniel Potter, Bailey Ocker and Yishan Xu. Overnight Custody Arrangements, Attachment, and Adjustment Among Very Young Children. Journal of Marriage and Family, 1 JUL 2013; Volume 75, Issue 4, August 2013, Pages: 871%u2013885 DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12045

Divorce early in childhood affects parental relationships in adulthood

Divorce has a bigger impact on child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the child's life, according to new research.

Those who experience parental divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience divorce later, researchers say.

R. Chris Fraley

"By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn more about how early experiences predict the quality of people's close relationships later in life," says R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Psychologists are especially interested in childhood experiences, as their impact can extend into adulthood, but studying such early experiences is challenging, as people's memories of particular events vary widely.

Parental divorce is a good event to study, he says, as people can accurately report if and when their parents divorced, even if they do not have perfect recollection of the details.

In two studies published today in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Fraley and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus fathers.

In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who participated in a survey about personality and close relationships through yourpersonality.net.

More than one-third of the survey participants' parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9 years old.

The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as secure.

And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3 to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in childhood.

"A person who has a secure relationship with a parent is more likely than someone who is insecure to feel that they can trust the parent," Fraley says.

"Such a person is more comfortable depending on the parent and is confident that the parent will be psychologically available when needed."

Although there was a tendency for people to experience more anxiety about romantic relationships if they were from divorced families, the link between parental divorce and insecurity in romantic relationships was relatively weak.

This finding was important, the researchers say, as it shows that divorce does not have a blanket effect on all close relationships in adulthood but rather is selective – affecting some relationships more than others.

They also found that parental divorce tends to predict greater insecurity in people's relationships with their fathers than with their mothers.

Conclusion
While it is premature to speculate on the implications of this work for decision-making regarding child custody, the work is valuable as it suggests that "something as basic as the amount of time that one spends with a parent or one's living arrangements" can shape the quality of child-parent relationships, write Fraley and Heffernan.

"People's relationships with their parents and romantic partners play important roles in their lives," Fraley says.

"This research brings us one step closer to understanding why it is that some people have relatively secure relationships with close others whereas others have more difficulty opening up to and depending on important people in their lives."

Read the full article here

More information: doi: 10.1177/0146167213491503