Mary Main's contributions to our family systems approach to interventions with parents of young children.

Abstract

In this paper we describe our Berkeley colleague Mary Main's intellectual contributions to our program of creating and evaluating couples group interventions for parents of young children. The first section presents the theoretical model and the projects at the heart of our research program. The second section illustrates how the Adult Attachment Interview, a Couple Attachment Interview, or a questionnaire describing attachment styles helped us to understand how internal working models of both parent-child and couple relationships added to our observational measures of couple and parenting behavior to provide unique information. In a third section, we conclude that we did not have the kind of impact on Mary's thinking that Mary had on ours, but we are heartened by seeing increasing attempts of some developmental attachment theorists to include fathers in their studies and others who focus on the effects of the quality of relationship between the parents on their children's development.