Attached

would carry this confidence into adulthood and future relationships with
romantic partners.
Does the evidence support these predictions? In 2000, Leslie
Atkinson, who conducts child development research at Ryerson
University in Toronto, in collaboration with several other colleagues,
conducted a meta-analysis that was based on forty-one prior studies.
In total, the study analyzed over two thousand parent-child pairs to
evaluate the connection between parent sensitivity and child
attachment style. The results showed a weak but significant link
between the two—children of mothers who were sensitive to their
needs were more likely to have a secure attachment style, but the weak
link means that, aside from methodological issues, there could be
many other variables that come into play to determine a child’s
attachment style. Among the factors that were found to increase a
child’s chance of being secure were an easy temperament (which
makes it easier for parents to be responsive), positive maternal
conditions—marital satisfaction, low stress and depression, and social
support—and fewer hours with a nonparental caretaker.
To complicate matters further, an idea that has been gaining
scientific momentum in recent years is that we are genetically
predisposed toward a certain attachment style. It was found, for
example, that adult identical twins, who share 100 percent of genes,
are much more likely to have the same attachment style than
nonidentical twins, who share only 50 percent of genes. Both identical
and fraternal twins are thought to share the same basic environment. In
other words, genes too play an important role in determining our
attachment style.
But even if we were secure in infancy, will it last into adulthood? To
test this question, attachment researchers reassessed subjects who
had been infants in the 1970s and 1980s and were now around 20
years old. Would the men and women classified as secure in early
childhood remain secure as adults? The answer remains unclear:
Three studies failed to find a correlation between attachment security
in infancy and in adulthood, while two other studies did find a
statistically significant connection between the two. What is clear is
that even if there is a correlation between attachment style in childhood