Attachment styles and mother’s well-being among mothers of preschool children in Korea: The mediating role of marital satisfaction

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Highlights

  • Anxious attachment influenced marital satisfaction.

  • Anxious attachment influenced mother’s well-being.

  • Marital satisfaction affected mother’s well-being.

  • Marital satisfaction mediated the associations.

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to investigate the mediating role of marital satisfaction in the link between attachment styles and mother’s well-being among mothers of preschool children in Korea. The participants were 208 mothers of preschool children recruited from 2 daycare centers and 3 kindergartens in Busan, South Korea. The participating mothers completed self-report questionnaires regarding attachment styles, marital satisfaction, and mother’s well-being. Mediation model tested using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013) revealed that marital satisfaction partially mediated the associations between anxious attachment and mother’s well-being. The findings suggest that both relational representations and present intimate relationships are crucial factors in mother’s well-being. The findings enhance the understanding of the paths from anxious attachment to mother’s well-being through marital satisfaction.

Introduction

Mothers of preschool children may have difficulties taking their new roles as parent. For example, mothers of preschool children reported that the period of transition to parenthood was the most difficult time of their lives (Leigh & Milgrom, 2008). Parenting was closely associated with an increase in maternal depressive symptoms (Evenson & Simon, 2005) and stress (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2003) as well as a decrease in positive emotions and happiness (Baumeister, 1991, Nomaguchi and Milkie, 2003) for mothers of preschool children. Korean mothers of preschool children also reported high levels of parenting stress (Jang & Han, 2011) and were distressed by parental roles (Park & Peterson, 2006).

The sense of well-being is particularly important for these young mothers and their children because the impact of the mother’s well-being on parenting is significant in early childhood (Adam, Gunnar, & Tanaka, 2004) and well-being in early life can be closely associated with well-being in adulthood (Luo & Waite, 2005). Many studies have supported that the positive and negative dimensions of the mother’s well-being are closely associated with her children’s outcomes. Maternal stress and anxiety have been shown to influence children’s behavioral problems (Belsky, 1984, Gutteling et al., 2005). In contrast, children of mothers who frequently expressed positive emotions were more likely to have high levels of social competence and social understanding as well as low levels of hostility and internalizing problems (Dunn et al., 1991, Rubin et al., 1998).

The mother’s well-being may be influenced by the quality and representations of her intimate relationships because relational factors are known as crucial predictors of women’s well-being (Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Attachment theory has provided a salient framework for the impact of relational representations on human adaptation and well-being throughout life (Bowlby, 1969, 1982, Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007b, van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-kranenburg, 1996). Particularly, attachment theory explicitly states that qualitatively different attachment styles are associated with individual differences in intimate relationships and emotion processing (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008), which may provide different pathways of how attachment relationships influence individual’s well-being. There are two different dimensions of attachment style: anxious and avoidant attachment (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2012, Richard and Schat, 2011). Individuals with high levels of anxious attachment tend to pursue excessively close relationships. Thus, if anxious individuals may not be satisfied with intimate relationships, it would have great influence on their well-being. In contrast, people with high levels of avoidant attachment are more likely to avoid close relationships and thus less likely to be distressed by unsatisfactory relationships. Ultimately, avoidant people’s well-being may not be much influenced by the quality of intimate relationships.

In line with different pathways of how attachment styles lead individual’s well-being, marital satisfaction may be mechanism which explains the associations between attachment styles and well-being, especially for mothers of preschool children. The claim is based on bottom-up spillover theory which suggests that relational representations can transfer to other intimate relationships as well as satisfaction in a certain domain can spill over to satisfaction in another or all other domain (Andrews and Withey, 1976, Campbell et al., 1976, Diener, 1984). The claim is also supported by the marital discord model of depression (Beach, Sandeen, & O’Leary, 1990). Beach and colleagues suggest that dissatisfaction in marriage have great impact on marital interactions, ultimately influencing couple’s negative and positive aspects of well-being. Indeed, the marital discord model of depression argues that the quality of marriage is antecedent of personal well-being. Furthermore, given that martial satisfaction and parent’s well-being are important but tend to decrease during the preschool period of their children (e.g., Belsky, 1985, Lawrence et al., 2008) and the effects of martial relationships on parent’s life satisfaction was empirically supported among mothers of preschool children in longitudinal study (Dyrdal, Roysamb, Nes, & Vitterso, 2010), it is important to examine how attachment relationships and marital satisfaction influence mother’s well-being during the preschool years. Taken together, marital satisfaction can be an important mediator linking different attachment relationships and the mother’s well-being for mothers of preschool children.

Many empirical findings have shown that insecure attachment is associated with low levels of well-being (Kobak et al., 1991, Priel and Shamai, 1995), whereas secure attachment is related to high levels of well-being (La Guardia et al., 2000, Torquati and Raffaelli, 2004). In addition, marital satisfaction has been consistently shown to be a crucial determinant of well-being for married people (DeLongis et al., 1998, Dyrdal et al., 2010, Proulx et al., 2007, Ryff et al., 2001, Whisman, 1999). Marital satisfaction has also been closely associated with attachment relationships in the literature (Brennan and Shaver, 1995, Feeney et al., 1994, Mikulincer and Shaver, 2012).

However, little information is provided concerning the mechanisms that might play a mediating role in the association between attachment styles and well-being. Although a few studies have explored the mediating model in the link between attachment relationships and well-being, they have typically used intrapersonal characteristics as mediators (e.g., emotion regulation, resilience, self-compassion, and relational satisfaction), and the findings on the relationship between attachment styles and well-being have presented mixed results (Karreman and Vingerhoets, 2012, Towler and Stuhlmacher, 2014, Wei et al., 2011). In addition, most of data investigating the associations have been conducted in individualistic cultures. Thus, more data is needed to enhance the understanding of processes how attachment styles might influence well-being particularly for people in collectivistic cultures that values interdependence and relationships (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).

Based on theoretical perspectives and empirical findings, the current study aims to explore marital satisfaction as a mediator between attachment styles and mother’s well-being in a sample of mothers of preschool children in South Korea. The specific goals of this study are to investigate whether anxious and avoidant attachment styles predict mother’s well-being and to examine whether martial satisfaction plays a mediating role in the association between attachment styles and mother’s well-being. Based on theory and empirical findings, it is hypothesized that marital satisfaction will mediate the associations between anxious and avoidant attachment and mother’s well-being in a sample of Korean mothers of preschool children. The specific hypotheses are: (a) anxious and avoidant attachment styles will decrease marital satisfaction; (b) anxious and avoidant attachment styles will decrease mother’s well-being; (c) marital satisfaction will increase mother’s well-being; and (d) marital satisfaction will mediate the link between anxious and avoidant attachment styles and well-being for Korean mothers with young children.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants included a total of 208 mothers with young children in South Korea. The participating mothers in the current study were recruited from two daycares and three kindergartens in Busan, South Korea. Of 300 surveys, 210 were replied to and two were excluded due to missing values. In terms of mother’s age, 2.9% of mothers were between 21 and 30 years old, 83.6% of mothers were between 31 and 40 years old, and 13.5% of mothers were between 41 and 50 years old. With respect to mothers’

Preliminary analysis

Mean, standard deviations, and the ranges of anxious and avoidant attachment, marital satisfaction, subjective well-being (SWB) are presented in Table 1. Correlations among study variables are presented in Table 2. The correlation analysis revealed that anxious attachment was significantly and negatively associated with marital satisfaction (r = −.43, p < .01) and SWB (r = −.57, p < .01) whereas avoidant attachment was not significantly related to any study variables. Marital satisfaction was

Discussion

The goals of the current study were to test the pathways from anxious and avoidant attachment to mother’s well-being through marital satisfaction in a sample of Korean mothers of preschool children. As anticipated, the research showed that anxious attachment was associated with marital satisfaction and mother’s well-being. Martial satisfaction was also closely associated with mother’s well-being. In addition, the mediating role of marital satisfaction in the link between anxious attachment and

Acknowledgement

The study was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2011-330-B00168).

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