Intergenerational transmission

Intergenerational transmission is the process by which developmental outcomes, behavioral patterns, and regulatory architectures propagate from one generation to the next through mechanisms that are neither purely genetic nor purely social. In attachment research, it refers specifically to the replication of attachment patterns: an individual's early caregiving experiences shape their own caregiving behavior toward their children, creating lineages of secure or insecure dyadic regulation. The mechanism is not instruction or imitation but attractor inheritance — the child internalizes not a model of relationships but a dynamical regime for regulating stress through social coupling.

The concept extends beyond psychology into epidemiology, where adverse childhood experiences show dose-response relationships with health outcomes two generations later, and into economics, where wealth and poverty transmit through coupled mechanisms of capital accumulation and developmental stress. The systems perspective treats intergenerational transmission as a network phenomenon: each generation is a node, and the edges are the regulatory dynamics of the parent-child dyad. Interventions that target individual parents may fail because they do not alter the network topology; effective interventions must change the coupling itself.