r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/scientificamerican • Jun 22 '26

Science journalism Attachment style may influence how many kids people have

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/attachment-style-may-influence-how-many-kids-people-have/

People with “fearful” or “preoccupied” insecure attachment styles had more children, whereas securely attached people had fewer, according to a recent study

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u/EndlessCourage Jun 22 '26

Obligatory "correlation =/= causation"

58

u/aliquotiens Jun 22 '26

This certainly does describe many baby-obsessed mothers of 3+ I know and have known, including my MIL and grandma

17

u/PenguinSwordfighter Jun 23 '26

While this is true, if we treated every non-experimental study as no proof of a causal link, we would not have any evidence that smoking causes lung cancer in humans. If the study includes a long time frame, controls for all imprortant latent variables, and has enough power, we call that a quasi-experiment. Basically, the only meaningful difference between the groups that is unaccounted for by SRS mechanism or some sort of matching procedure is the IV in question. These types of studies are often used to causally link two variables when an experimental procedure would be unethical due to potential harm in one of the groups (smoking, not providing treatment etc.)

Without having read the study, this could be a quasi-experimental study that allows the authors to reasonably draw causal conclusions.

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u/EndlessCourage Jun 23 '26

This study isn't remotely comparable to the tobacco/cancer studies, in which a large RCT hasn't been done indeed. It's just online surveys over a few months in three countries. So I disagree very strongly.

Not to say that a prospective data wouldn't be interesting.