proportion of parent-child conflicts which ended in a "reconciliation" or an authoritarian establishment of parental control. Presumably their interview measure yielded less significant contrasts than their "better index of serious parenting problems" (p. 47.) It is unclearwhich is at fault: the interview measure itself, or their coding of it. To rely solely on whether a local government has decided to take a child into care as the dependent variable may be under-inclusive or perhaps at times over-inclusive? and it also seems a rather crude objective criterion of parenting difficulty.
The studies on loss and family disruption which focus on parents' objective childhood experience have failed to take into account the adult's subjective experience: the individual's representational model of attachment experiences,- relationships, which Bowlby's theory of the internal working model posits as central. It is these internal representations of early experience which are likely to be incorporated into the model which guides parental behaviour.
Some of the strongest evidence for the view that an adult's current construction of past experience is more important than the experience itself in its determining effect on later behaviour comes from the literature on cycles of abuse.
The notion that abused children grow up to be abusing parents has been widely used in the literature (Steele & Pollock, 1968? Kempe & Kempe, 1978). Although most of these claims have been based on clinical case histories, the few empirical investigations do find support for this proposition. For example, Herrenkohl & Toedter (1983) found that 47% of parents who were abused as children abuse their own children, a percentage which was significantly higher than among parents who had not suffered abuse. Egeland, Jacobvitz & Sroufe (1988) draw attention to the fact that many parents who were abused as children do not abuse their own children (53% in the Herrenkohl study). The Egeland group followed a sample of impoverished mothers who had been abused as children for three years. 70% maltreated or provided borderline care (i.e. were suspected of maltreatment) to their children. The higher rate of intergenerational concordance is attributed to the fact that poverty is associated with a higher incidence of abuse. Still, 30% did not repeat the pattern. Abuse clearly does not inevitably lead to abuse. A major variable distinguishing the members of the experimental group who abused from those who did not was mother's relationship with her own parents and her current relationship with her husband/boyfriend. Most of the mothers who broke the cycle of abuse were currently in a long-term, stable relationship with their partner. Compared to the group of mothers' who abused, they describe
their relationships as more satisfying, received higher ratings on emotional support and were significantly less likely to be in an abusive relationship with a partner. Those mothers who broke the cycle were also likely to have reported that foster parents, a relative, or one of their parents, provided them with emotional support as children. Those mothers who were apparently unable to break the cycle of abuse scored higher on indices of stressful life events and tended to live in more chaotic and disruptive environments.
Some of the mothers who broke the cycle of abuse were in psychotherapy as adolescents or young adults. Egeland et al. describe these mothers as very aware of their past history of abuse; they were able to recall it in great detail and spoke of the abuse with much emotion and were generally highly articulate about the way in which they intended to raise their children. In contrast, the mothers who failed to breakt he cycle of abuse spoke in generalities about their history of abuse, their recall was vague, and they lacked understanding of the association between their attachment history and the care they provided to their children. Their affects and cognitions deriving from their attachment history did not seem integrated into their current view of her self, in contrast to the group who broke the cycle.
Associations between parents' subjective evaluations of oast experience and current quality of the child-parent attachment
In recent years developmental psychologists have turned their attention to the task of assessing the adult's security of attachment which it is hypothesized, is thought to be mentally represented and organized by the internal working model. This line of research complements and extends the abundance of findings based on behaviourial assessments of infants during the Strange Situation. Indeed the validity of these new measures derives from their association to this robust tool of assessment of infants' security of attachment. Two studies, one involving an interview-based assessment (Morris, 1980, 1981) and the other a self-report measure, compared adult's security of attachment with their children's Strange Situation classifications.
Morris (1980, 1981) selected 36 mothers from Sroufe and Egeland's sample of 267 economically disadvantaged mothers in order to investigate the relationship between maternal history and Strange Situation classifications of their children at 12 and 18 months as well as the tool- using task (Matas, Arend, and Sroufe, 1978). When the children were two years old, their mother's history was assessed using a 160-item interview designed to yield information about childhood relationships, the mother's
current relationship to her mother and her current social support network. Interviews were coded by two clinically trained judges who applyied distinctly different criteria. The first judge emphasized the quality of the relationship to mother, the quality of the home milieu, the presence of severe crisis and the mother's sense of how she coped with these crises. The second judge stressed criteria the objective amount of crisis in the mother's history and in her current experience. The criteria which the first judge used were overwhelmingly more powerful predictors of the children's classifications in the Strange Situation; they accurately predicted of 31 out of 36 Strange Situation classifications. It is important to note that there were some striking mistakes in the designations thought appropriate by the second judge. Some of the mothers whose histories involved sexual abuse, role-reversal, marital discord, and a generally hostile home environment did well on the three child outcome variables. The opposite also applied. Some mothers who reported harmonious families of origin, little or no crisis, and abundant support nevertheless did not have children who were rated securely attached on the 3 child outcome variables. This confirms the importance of considering the subjective meaning of a mother's developmental history as a mediating variable, rather than solely relying on objective reports.
Ricks (1985) reports an apparently successful attempt to obtain questionnaire-based assessments of both a
of that experience. In Ricks study of 28 middle-class mother-infant dyads, she not only administered the Sources of Self-Esteem Inventory (SOSE: O'Brien, 1981) but also, the Mother-Father-Peer Scale (MFP:Epstein, 1983) in conjunction with the Strange Situation assessment at 12 months. Mothers of securely attached infants were found to have higher self-esteem scores and more positive recollections of childhood relationships with their mothers, fathers and peers than mothers of anxiously attached infants. This finding is consistent in a general way with attachment theory's hypothesis that positive childhood experiences give rise to an individual with high self-esteem who is then able to facilitate a secure attachment in their infant. Conclusions about the direction of influence underlying these findings must remain in the realm of speculation because the different measures were administered concurrently; therefore, it could be that having a baby mediates one's recollection of childhood experience rather than memories of childhood influencing mothers' abilties to faciltate a secure attachment with their infant. It would be interesting to see if a study with a prospective design would reveal similar associations.
A crucial question concerning Ricks' finding is whether or not questionnaire-based measures can distinguish those mothers who are inclined to defensively idealize or
otherwise distort the meaning of their past experience from those who do not? Although the two questionnaires employed together possess 3 scales designed to assess defensive idealization, only one of these scales effectively distinguished the groups? paradoxically, it was the mothers of the securely attached children who were higher on this scale (e.g. idealization of father). Given the previous findings discussed above (e.g. Spieker and Booth, 1988), one would expect that mothers of avoidantly attached infants would be higher on measures of idealization. Ricks gives no explanation for this finding? however, it may be an artifact, it may be beyond the scope of a self-report measure to accurately assess the construct of defensive idealization and related features of the organization of an adult*s internal working model.
SUMMARY
As chapter one made clear, it is well-established that the infant's internal working model is sufficiently well- organized by 12 months of age so as to be reflected in behaviours expressed during separation and reunion in the Strange Situation. In their attempts to identify what underlies and predicts the Strange Situation, researchers have considered a diverse range of possible influences, including infant temperament, parental confidence and self esteem, marital quality and social support. Both the findings from developmental psychology and also, from epidemiology point to the central significance of the parent's developmental history. Moreover, it is clear that this history has at least two important elements; what happened and the way in which the adult currently construes what happened. The latter notion is conceptually akin to Bowlby's theory of the internal working model. Morris and Ricks have shown that the adult's internal working model is open to empirical investigation using objective assessments of childhood history and self-reports? however, they have been unable to yeild a measure of the adult's security of attachment as robust as that of the child's in the Strange Situation. Why? Perhaps it is because these measures have not taken sufficient account of the adult's mode of expressing affect-laden experience through language in a way that is consistent with the code used to assess the infant's Strange Situation behaviour. The next chapter
will review attempts to systematically assess the adult's organization of cognitions and affects concerning relationships in conjunction with Strange Situation assessments.