Observational study reveals lower parental empathy linked to adult attachment avoidance in parents of young children, highlighting targets for family interventions.
Key Points
To evaluate how adult attachment avoidance and anxiety predict multidimensional parental empathy toward children across early to middle childhood.
Assessed attachment style and child-directed empathy across four independent samples totaling 349 parents of children ages 3–10 years.
Administered the Experiences in Close Relationships scale alongside an adapted Interpersonal Reactivity Index assessing empathic concern, perspective-taking, and personal distress.
Conducted cross-sectional evaluations and a 4-month longitudinal analysis (Study 1), controlling for maternal education and child sex.
Attachment avoidance consistently associated with significantly lower parental empathic concern across all samples and lower perspective-taking among parents of preschoolers.
Longitudinal analysis demonstrated that baseline attachment avoidance predicted relative declines in parental perspective-taking over 4 months.
Attachment anxiety showed mixed and largely null associations with empathy outcomes, and neither attachment dimension predicted personal distress after covariate adjustment.