Abstract

Data from a socioeconomically diverse sample of 11-year-old children, collected in the final year of a 10-year longitudinal study of child development conducted by Professor Claire Hughes, sheds light on the significance of children’s relationships with their animal companions. This study is an exploration of the extent to which human-pet relationships can be considered in traditional terms of attachment, the validity of using a tool adapted from a widely accepted measure of human relationship quality for assessing attachment to pets, how children’s pet relationships compare to their sibling relationships, which environmental and demographic factors are predictive of the quality of the child-pet relationship, and what social, emotional, and behavioural outcomes are correlated with strong attachment to pets.