Why Some Parents Doubt Themselves: A Wound That Echoes Across Generations
Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
Let’s say you’re a mother standing in the frozen food aisle while your child has an existential crisis over the shape of dinosaur nuggets.
You feel judged. Inadequate.
Not just by strangers, but by some deep internal critic who sounds suspiciously like your own mother.
If you’ve ever felt that your parenting manual is missing a chapter—on how to feel like a good parent—you're not alone. And now, we have science to thank for explaining why.
A new study out of Belgium (Delhalle & Blavier, 2024) gives us a tidy psychological nesting doll: inside some struggling parents are anxious partners; inside those anxious partners are wounded children.
And while this may not come as a shock to anyone who's lived through both a dysfunctional childhood and a chaotic PTA meeting, what’s novel here is how clearly the mechanism was tested and statistically verified.
A Broken Mirror: Childhood Maltreatment and the Parenting Self
We like to believe that time heals all wounds, but psychological research suggests otherwise.
What time actually does is let the wounds rehearse new disguises. One of the most insidious? Attachment anxiety—a pattern that says, “You’re not safe, you’ll be abandoned, and love must be earned with hypervigilance and self-sacrifice.”
This study asked 1,904 French-speaking Belgian mothers, all raising children aged 3 to 8, to report on their childhood abuse, their adult romantic attachment style, and how competent they felt as parents.
These weren’t just casual questions either—researchers used validated instruments like the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire – Short Form (CTQ-SF)(Bernstein et al., 2003), the Parenting Sense of Competence scale (PSOC) (Johnston & Mash, 1989), and the Relationship Scales Questionnaire (RSQ) (Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994).
The results were sobering: Over half of the mothers reported at least one type of childhood maltreatment, most commonly emotional abuse and neglect.
For many, the ghosts of childhood hadn’t gone away; they’d just changed outfits and now stood beside them in the kitchen, whispering doubts during diaper changes and tantrums.
The Mediation: When Attachment Style Hijacks the Parent Brain
Here’s the crux of the study: attachment anxiety acted as a mediator—a psychological middleman—between childhood maltreatment and the mother’s confidence in her parenting.
That is, mothers who were emotionally abused as children were more likely to develop an anxious attachment style in adulthood, which in turn made them feel less capable and less satisfied in their parenting role (Delhalle & Blavier, 2024).
Attachment avoidance, on the other hand, didn’t seem to play the same damning role.
In fact, avoidantly attached mothers reported slightly higher levels of parental efficacy. Likely because if you don’t care deeply about intimacy, your child's meltdowns might register more as noise than narcissistic injury.
But attachment anxiety?
That’s the real saboteur. It whispers: “You are not doing enough. You will lose them. They will hate you. And it will be your fault.” Parents with high attachment anxiety often report lower parenting satisfaction and efficacy, though not necessarily less interest in parenting.
In a way, they care too much—and the caring tends to become corrosive.
Caveats, as Always: Self-Report, Cross-Sectional, and Oh, Belgium
The researchers were careful to note some limitations.
All measures were self-reported and retrospective, opening the door for recall bias.
And the design was cross-sectional, which means we’re mapping correlations—not proving causation. So we can’t say that attachment anxiety causes poor parental confidence. But we can say they show up together at the party suspiciously often.
Also, let’s not forget the sample: French-speaking Belgian moms.
We can't be entirely sure these findings map directly onto other cultures, like, say, overworked American moms microdosing podcast advice between Target runs. But odds are, they probably do.
What Do We Do With This?
The point here isn’t just to sigh sympathetically. It’s to say: If you’re a parent who doubts themselves, and you also grew up in a house where love was rationed or weaponized, this study is for you.
It’s not your fault. But it is your pattern. And once you name a pattern, you can decide what to do with it.
The authors conclude that therapeutic interventions should be targeted—not just broadly at all struggling parents—but especially toward those who are high in attachment anxiety and have a history of childhood trauma.
Programs like attachment-based family therapy (Diamond et al., 2016) or trauma-informed parenting interventions may offer more traction than generalized parent coaching.
Or, to put it bluntly: before we teach parents better strategies, we need to teach them they are allowed to feel safe.
Final Thought: The Real Inheritance
This study reminds us that what we pass down isn’t just recipes and bedtime routines—it’s how we feel inside our own skin when we’re needed.
That invisible inheritance—the capacity to trust ourselves while loving someone else—may be the most fragile and the most essential of all.
And it starts by realizing that parenting isn’t about perfection.
It’s about having the confidence to keep showing up—even when the dinosaur nuggets are wrong.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bernstein, D. P., Stein, J. A., Newcomb, M. D., Walker, E., Pogge, D., Ahluvalia, T., ... & Zule, W. (2003). Development and validation of a brief screening version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Child Abuse & Neglect, 27(2), 169–190. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0145-2134(02)00541-0
Delhalle, M., & Blavier, A. (2024). Child maltreatment, adult romantic attachment and parental sense of competence. Child Abuse & Neglect, 154, 106309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106309
Diamond, G., Russon, J., & Levy, S. (2016). Attachment-based family therapy: A review of the empirical support. Family Process, 55(3), 595–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12241
Griffin, D. W., & Bartholomew, K. (1994). Models of the self and other: Fundamental dimensions underlying measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 430–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.430
Johnston, C., & Mash, E. J. (1989). A measure of parenting satisfaction and efficacy. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 18(2), 167–175. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15374424jccp1802_8