About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 22. Social Relationships

Abstract

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Romantic adjustment is a salient developmental task in emerging adulthood (Roisman et al., 2004), and evidence shows that competence in romantic relationships across adulthood is concurrently and prospectively associated with physical and psychosocial adjustment (Holt & Lunstad 2010; Braithwaite & Lunstad, 2017; South, 2021). Interpersonal experiences in childhood that are theoretically and empirically associated with adult romantic adjustment include direct experiences- such as sensitivity of primary caregiving (Raby et al., 2015) and friendship quality (Allen et al., 2022), and indirect experiences- such as observations of romantic interactions between caregivers (Bryant & Conger, 2002). Although each of these domains of childhood experiences have been linked to adult romantic adjustment, existing studies tend to focus on just one or two domains of early interpersonal experiences, and often fails to capture the cumulative role of social experiences across the entirety of childhood. This has, to date, prevented researchers from testing whether distinct childhood experiences uniquely influence adult romantic functioning.

To address these limitations of the literature, this report leveraged data from the subsample of romantically involved participants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) at the most recent assessment of the cohort (n = 505; Mage = 28.6 years; 58.1% female; 81.7% White/non-Hispanic) to study the role of three theoretically salient childhood interpersonal experiences as antecedents of self-reported romantic relationship adjustment in early adulthood. Predictors were measured multiple times prospectively in childhood through adolescence and included: (1) direct observations of maternal sensitivity in dyadic interactions with participants from age 1 month through 15 years, (2) participants’ reports of the quality of their best friendships from Grade 3 to age 15 years, and (3) participants’ primary caregivers’ reports about the quality of their own romantic relationships when target participants were aged between 1 month and 15 years. Composite assessments of these three childhood interpersonal exposures were each uniquely (albeit in aggregate modestly, ΔR2 = 0.05) predictive of participants’ romantic relationship adjustment in young adulthood after accounting for demographic covariates.

The results of this prospective, longitudinal analysis were consistent with claims in the literature, specifically the behavioral systems approach (Furman et al., 1999), that the quality of childhood experiences in each of these key interpersonal domains independently predicts adjustment in adult romantic relationships. As such, our key finding that each interpersonal domain uniquely predicts romantic adjustment is an important contribution to the empirical literature and supports theoretical propositions that have been widely assumed but have not been directly tested by prior longitudinal research. Finally, our finding that mothers’ romantic intimacy independently predicted offsprings’ adult romantic satisfaction after accounting for other key interpersonal exposures is a particularly important contribution. This suggests that adult romantic adjustment is not only developed through one’s direct relational experiences with caregivers and peers but may also reflect childhood observations of romantic processes in one’s family of origin.

Author information

Author	Role
Phil Sternberg Lamb, University of North Carolina-Greensboro	Presenting author
Or Dagan, Long Island University	Non-presenting author
Keely A Dugan, University of Missouri-Columbia	Non-presenting author
Maria Bleil, University of Washington	Non-presenting author
Cathryn Booth-LaForce, University of Washington	Non-presenting author

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