Discuss the Influence of Childhood on Adult Relationships (8 and 16 marks)

Parent-Child Relationships are one way in which childhood can affect your adult relationships. Shaver et al (1988) said that our romantic love in adult relationships is effected by three things from our childhood; attachment, caregiving and sexuality. Relationships in adulthood are said to be a continuum of early attachment styles because this promotes your internal working model of relationships. Caregiving is also learned by modelling the behaviour of your primary caregiver, along with sexuality.

Simpson et al (2007) carried out a longitudinal study across 25 years to support the effects of Parent-child relationships on Adult relationships. He studies 78 participants at 4 key points across the 25 years; infancy, where at one year caregivers reported on their attachment behaviour, early childhood, where at 6-8 years teachers were asked about interactions of the child with peers, adolescence, where at 16 participants were asked to describe any friendships or relationships, and adulthood, where participants romantic relationships were described. He found that the expressions of emotion in adult relationships can be lined back to a person’s early attachment experiences and that those who were securely attached as infants were more socially confident at 6-8 years, closer to their friends at 16 and more expressive and emotionally attached in relationships in adulthood. This supports the fact that Parent-Child relationships have an effect on adult relationships as it shows that the relationship in the form of the attachment type between a parent and child does in fact affect how attached and emotional we are in adult relationships.    

An undermining study of the effects that parent-child relationships have on adult relationships was carried out by Suomi and Harlow (1978) who looked at rhesus monkeys and the effect early attachment had on them and found that those moneys whom when young had had completely adequate parent-child relationships but bad peer relationships where the ones who displayed inappropriate social and sexual behaviour as adults. The longer they were left without contact with other young monkeys the worse this got. This would undermine the effects of parent-child relationships on adult relationships as this showed that adult relationships are more likely to be effected by bad peer relationships than parent-child relationships.

However this study was carried out on animals and therefore the results are not as undermining of parent-child relationships effect on adult relationships as those of a study carried out on humans would be and the results cannot be fully generalised to humans which causes the study to lack external validity. Although experiment into this topic cannot be carried out on human children as it carries big ethical issues and therefore conducting studies on animals is the only way we can gain an insight into certain topic areas.

Another way in which childhood can affect adult relationships is through childhood abuse. This can have a number of negative effects on adult’s psychological functions, especially in their trust of other people. This therefore makes it difficult for those adults to form and maintain a healthy relationship.

Berenson and Anderson (2006) provided support for the idea that abused children have difficulties in adult relationships by finding that adult women in particular who had been abused in childhood displayed negative reactions to those who reminded them of their abusive parent and that they tend to use inappropriate behaviour learnt from this parent in their own relationships causing their relationships to often be negative ones. This supports the fact that childhood influences adult relationships as it shows that behaviour learnt in childhood is carried on into adult relationships and when this is bad or abusive it can ruin and adult relationships.

The influence of childhood on adult relationships can be seen to be deterministic as it says that our childhood has a fixed effect on our adult relationship, however this is not the case as we have free will to choose how we act in later relationships and whether or not to let these experiences lead us. Also social learning theory would say that we learn though observing other which in this case could be seeing relationships completely different to those we have experienced before and copying those instead of building on our own bad experiences.