Mental Health and Well-Being in Adolescence: The Role of Child Attachment and Parental Reflective Functioning

Abstract

AbstractAdolescence is a sensitive developmental period, with important changes occurring at biological, cognitive, emotional and social levels. As evidenced by several studies, adolescence is also a vulnerable period for the onset of serious mental disorders, which then tend to persist into adulthood. While there is ample evidence concerning risk factors of mental disorders in adolescence, a lot less is known about protective factors: however, one important protective factor to have emerged from recent research concerns attachment security. The aim of the current paper is to explore the effects of attachment on emotion regulation (in terms of physiological reactivity), autonomy and relatedness, and behavioral problems in adolescence, and how attachment is in turn influenced by parental reflective functioning (PRF), parenting behaviors (operationalized in terms of behaviors promoting and undermining autonomy relatedness) and parenting stress (in terms of cortisol reactivity). The findings point to the potential utility of interventions aimed at enhancing attachment security, thus allowing a better psychological adjustment, and at improving PRF, especially in divorced families, given its protective effect on parenting stress and parenting behaviors.