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Mary Ainsworth came up with a theory called the Attachment Theory in 1978. She believed these behaviors happen early in life, and the child grows with these attachment problems later in personal relationships.
According to the theory by Ainsworth, there are three types of attachment.
The first is secure attachment, which is usually found in traditional family homes. According to the theory, people who have secure attachment in their families are more likely to become friendly or intimate with others, they can be dependent on others or have others depend on them, and they don't worry about being neglected or abandoned.
The second is avoidant attachment, which is usually found in broken families. Children in these families are uneasy with being close, trusting or being dependent, and they are nervous when others become too friendly or intimate.
The third is anxious/ ambivalent attachment, which is usually found in homes that are unstable in that one day the parent will tell the child how great he or she is but then the next day will put the child down.
Children in anxious/ ambivalent homes are very clingy and needy. Usually in relationships they will be anxious that their partner doesn't love them or will leave them. They also often want to be very close to their partner, so it often results in scaring their partner or others away.
Demaree Johnson, associate professor of family and consumer sciences, said there is a way to break these attachments for every child.
"It doesn't mean you can't change [the attachments]," Johnson said. "It's also not just in single parent families that you can see [attachment issues], but there are ways to re-parent them and change that."
One way parents can go about changing this is by having a male role model.
“One of the problems in single parent families is that it's not that they aren't good parents and can't provide for their children, but they are still just one parent so their child is only getting half," Johnson said.
Another way parents can go about changing those attachments is by consistently parenting their kids.
"Set rules and follow them," Johnson said. "Many parents are more lenient or they treat their child as a peer or a substitute for a partner, telling them all their many problems instead of treating them like a child."
According to the Web site http://www.opfs.org.uk/factfile/children, the results of a survey based on pooled data from 80,000 adults suggest that parental divorce has an adverse effect on children's lives compared with those raised in intact two-parent families. Adults who experienced a parental divorce had lower psychological well-being, more behavioral problems, less education, lower job status, a lower standard of living, lower marital satisfaction, a heightened risk of divorce, a heightened risk of being a single parent, and poorer physical health.
"Part of it is that it's what they've grown up and seen," Johnson said. "Divorced single parents are more acceptable to them because that's all they grew up and saw. Another interesting thing that we find is if people haven't attached to parents they have a harder time attaching in relationships because they haven't learned how to attach to anyone."
Tim Eicher, associate professor of family and consumer science, said a person's family situation certainly has an effect on his or her future romantic relationships.
Eicher said: “You can’t always say that a child will grow up to be just like their parents because they have the agency to choose their own future, but there is a greater likelihood that they will. A person could actually go the opposite way their parents raised them. For instance, a child could be spanked by their parents and the child will grow up saying, 'I will never spank my children.'”
The same goes in future relationships, Eicher said. A person could look at his or her parents and use them as an example of how not to be.
Eicher said: “One of the beauties of how resilient people can be is how capable they are of healing from the most awful of things. If you look at people in the death camps in the Holocaust, most of them experienced some terrible things but most went on to raise normal families. People do have the capacity to recover from even the worst conditions.”
Relationships can be risky when people in one’s family life are disappearing, and that can explain the attachment theory and how it really does affect people’s future relationships, Eicher said.
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