Abstract
Steele, Perez, Segal, and Steele (2016) contributed with an informative study, showing that adolescents’ reflective functioning (RF) is predicted by maternal attachment representation, which was assessed even before the youth were born using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985). Such a result is in line with previous findings from the London Parent-Child Project (Steele & Steele, 2005) and with years of attachment research, positing the vital role of maternal state of mind in shaping the child’s inner world.
For years, researchers have been dedicated to answering the question of how those effects are produced. The classic model explains the link between maternal state of mind and child development through maternal sensitivity, arguing that the way in which the mother reflects upon her own attachment experiences influences her capacity to respond to her child’s needs (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Empirical results supported this view, showing that autonomous mothers display more sensitive behavior toward their children (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), which, in turn, influences a child’s emotional and mental processes (Grossmann, Grossmann, Winter, & Zimmermann, 2002).
There is reason to believe, however, that maternal state of mind may contribute to the child’s inner world not just via its effect on sensitivity, but in other ways as well (De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997), including through maternal conversations with the child. Mothers classified as autonomous in the AAI are more able to discuss their own childhood experiences in a coherent and emotionally open manner. It is expected that this strategy influences the way in which they talk to their children: in comparison to insecure mothers, who are anchored on defensively distorted emotional strategies, autonomous ones are more able to encourage children to communicate about and reflect upon their own and others’ thoughts and feelings.
Supported by a longitudinal design, prior results from the London Parent-Child Project already foresaw the importance of maternal reflective and emotionally integrated narrative to serve as a meaningful learning context for the child from infancy to childhood. More precisely, the authors reported that mothers who tended to use more psychological constructs during pre-birth AAIs were more likely to have securely attached infants (Fonagy et al., 1991), finding later that maternal AAI autonomous state of mind was linked to the child’s ability to tell a coherent and integrated story about his/her own and others’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences at age 11 (Steele & Steele, 2005).
These findings seem to go in line with and provide further support to the view that from the earliest mother-child conversations, centered on the sharing of emotions and thoughts, children start to organize their inner world and give meaning to their experiences (Bretherton, 1990). Since early ages, children are motivated to learn about emotions and their causes, and by being exposed to a reflective maternal talk in everyday interactions, they have the opportunity to learn words that will serve as mental tools to reflect on the inner world. The socio-cognitive literature makes a parallel with and informs such a view by showing that richer maternal discourse in terms of references to emotions and other mental states facilitates the development of children’s metacognitive processes (Baptista et al., 2016; Meins et al., 2002).
It remains unclear, however, why fathers’ state of mind was unrelated to adolescents’ RF in the Steele et al. study. This may be due to the fact that mothers of the children in the London Parent-Child Project spent more time on average with their children than fathers. It may also be the case that both mothers and fathers influence child RF, but in a qualitatively different manner. These issues remain and, thus, future empirical work is clearly needed on transactional and parent-specific processes involved in the way children develop their inner world.