# Elucidating the legacy of early parent-child relationship: A new developmental synthesis of temperament, internal representation, and behavior

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF IOWA · 2022 · $270,190

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
The overarching goal of this research is to promote children's positive, adaptive pathways of socioemotional
development and to prevent maladaptive pathways. Our work explains why some children embark on positive
paths toward prosocial, internalized, rule-abiding conduct, and robust social competence, whereas others
enter maladaptive paths toward callousness, disregard for conduct rules and others' feelings, antisocial
behavior, and impoverished competence. We focus on the parent-child early attachment relationship, formed
in the first years of life, as a source of those divergent pathways, and we longitudinally chart its complex,
indirect yet powerful, long-term implications. On the basis of our past and current work, correlational and
experimental, in low- and high-risk families, we propose that although early parent-child attachment may not
have long-term unqualified, direct effects, it nevertheless serves as a powerful catalyst or moderator of future
dynamics unfolding between the parent and the child. Specifically, early attachment insecurity sets the stage
for an adversarial, negative cascade. In insecure parent-child dyads, the child's difficult temperament easily
triggers the parent's negative, coercive, power-assertive control, which, in turn, leads to maladaptive child
outcomes. In contrast, early security sets the stage for positive, cooperative, effective socialization, and
defuses risks of negative cascades. To elucidate mechanisms explaining those processes, we propose that
the divergent cascades are due to parents' and children's differing internal representations, expectations, and
perceptions of each other (Internal Working Models, or IWMs) that characterize insecure and secure dyads.
Those IWMs then come to guide parents' and children's behavior and interactions. A new study of 200
community mothers, fathers, and infants, intensively assessed at 7-9, 15-17, 36-38, and 46-48 months, will
test this model. Deploying state-of-the-science measures of parents' and children's social representations, in
Aim 1 we examine their emerging negative or positive IWMs of each other as linked to their early insecure or
secure attachment relationships. Those IWMs are then tested as key mechanisms accounting for divergent
cascades that unfold in insecure and secure relationships. In Aim 2, we examine the parent's IWM of the
child as moderating the link between child difficulty and parental control, and in Aim 3, we examine the child's
IWM of the parent as moderating the link between parental control and child outcomes. Our team includes
experts in socioemotional development, infant and adult cognition, molecular genetics, and methodology and
statistics. In a multi-method, multi-level approach, we collect observational, genetic, and reported measures
of parent and child social cognition, temperament, attachment, parental control, and children's outcomes.
Analyses rely on structural equation modeling to elucidate mechanisms of divergent dev...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10607184
- **Project number:** 3R01HD091047-05S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
- **Principal Investigator:** GRAZYNA KOCHANSKA
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $270,190
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2022-04-15 → 2024-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10607184

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10607184, Elucidating the legacy of early parent-child relationship: A new developmental synthesis of temperament, internal representation, and behavior (3R01HD091047-05S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10607184. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*