Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

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HHumans are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to navigate the troubled waters and encourage us when we shine. A popular school of psychology known as attachment theory suggests that these close relationships tend to follow established patterns that differ from person to person: Some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about being abandoned, less willing to trust even those we care about most.

Now, a large new study spanning 30 years has found that our early friendships may have the biggest impact on how we “attach” to our friends and romantic partners as adults. If true, this finding would overturn the conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment styles later in life. The research team found that, in fact, mothers came second and fathers, at least in the cohort studied, had little influence. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyfollowed 705 people and their families over three decades, starting in the 1990s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early 1980s, and it entered popular discourse in the following decades. The theory evolved, with later research suggesting that our attachment styles are shaped throughout our lives by multiple relationships, not just those with our parents, as Bowlby originally proposed.

But until now, few studies have experimentally tested, throughout a person’s life, the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory. To do this, Keely Dugan, assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri, and colleagues analyzed data from a landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families, which began in 1991 and spanned 15 years. They then followed up with 705 of the original study participants, now aged 26 to 31.

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Data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors periodically videotaped mothers and fathers interacting with their young children and took notes on their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed conflict and closeness between parents and children through parent reports and measured parental warmth and hostility through child reports. They also looked at how children rated the quality of their friendship and collected reports from teachers and parents about their social skills with peers.

In the follow-up, Dugan and her team assessed the now-adult participants’ attachment styles and relationship quality with their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, mother’s education level, 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 individual relationships with friends, romantic partners, and father, accounting for 2 to 3 percent of the differences in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and fuzzy during their youth tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the interaction with the mother, the more potentially it appears to have an important influence. But early friendships played an even larger role than maternal relationships in how people experienced their adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4% of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best-friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11% of adults’ partner- and best-friend-specific avoidance.

“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends as a child, then you felt more secure in your romantic and friendly relationships by age 30,” Dugani said. Scientific American. “When you make your first friendships at school, that’s when you practice the give-and-take dynamic,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then reflect these dynamics.”

All the more reason to choose your schoolyard friends wisely.

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Main image: Ihnatovich Maryia / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on November 11, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.