Implications of attachment to mother and father for math anxiety
Résumé
Math Anxiety (MA) was found to be related with both general anxiety (GA) and insecure attachment to the mother. Insecure attachment is also related to GA. Nevertheless, no study examines the relationship among MA, GA and attachment representation to the mother and to the father. Our aim is to better understand the extent of GA in the link between mother attachment and GA, and to examine the relationship between MA, GA and father attachment. The study was conducted among 204 children (94 girls;110 boys), aged from 100 months to 142 months (M= 124.6, SD= 7.81). We assessed attachment to mother and father with two distinct forms of the French version of the IPPA for Children (Inventory of Parents and Peer Attachment). We examined GA with the STAI-C (State trait anxiety Inventory for Children) and MA with the EVAM (French-language adaptation of the Scale Evaluation of MA). As GA and MA differed according to children gender, we controlled gender in the main analyses.
Results show a link between: 1) attachment insecurity (to mother and father) and MA; 2) attachment insecurity and GA; 3) MA and GA. Contrary to the link between mother attachment and MA, the association between father attachment and MA becomes insignificant when controlling for GA. Regression analyses show that GA totally mediated the link between father attachment and MA, and moderated the link between mother attachment and MA. When examining each subscale of the IPPA for Children separately, we found that trust toward the mother better predicted MA than other attachment dimension to the mother and to the father.
Our data showed that mother attachment, in particular trust, but not father attachment, explained a part of MA. This finding could be partly explained by the importance of maternal attitudes toward mathematics in the unconscious cognitive constructs of MA.