A solid relationship with a mother is one of the most beautiful things in the world and a good portent for a happy married life.

Women are often credited with fostering emotional intelligence in their children, and research shows that couples with greater emotional intelligence are likely to have a higher degree of marital satisfaction and fewer conflicts.

However, an unhealthy relationship might lead to what we call mommy issues. Even though it isn't an actual clinical term, the concepts behind it can often be explained through a psychological lens, like the attachment theory.

This theory came from John Bowlby, who figured out that attachment styles formed in early childhood can dictate the nature of a person's relationships in the future. Many times, people who had issues with their mothers develop an insecure attachment style, which can be categorized into three groups:

• Anxious-preoccupied: If you find that you are particularly clingy or demanding in relationships, it could be a sign of an anxious-preoccupied attachment style. It's basically the ongoing concern that your partner won't be around when you need them the most.
• Fearful-avoidant: If you find it hard to connect and generally become more distant and detached in romantic relationships, this can be a sign of a fearful-avoidant attachment style. This happens when someone is afraid of getting hurt, so they close themselves off in order to protect against the possibility.
• Dismissive-avoidant: If you find yourself avoiding romantic relationships altogether, this could be a sign that you have a dismissive-avoidant attachment style. In this case, people typically avoid deeper relationships as a whole because they have proven too difficult to navigate in the past.

Research from the University of Reading says that children, especially boys, who have insecure attachments to their mothers in the early years have more behavior problems later in childhood.

The analysis by Dr. Pasco Fearon, from the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, looked at 69 studies involving almost 6,000 children aged 12 and younger and sought to clarify the extent to which bonds between children and their moms early in life affect children's later behavioral problems, such as aggression or hostility.

"The central question we posed was whether attachment insecurity was associated with behavior problems across all the studies conducted to date," Dr. Fearon said. " The results showed quite clearly that the answer to this question is a firm yes."

"More specifically, our analysis showed that children with insecure attachments to their mothers, particularly boys, had significantly more behavioral problems, even when the behavioral problems were measured years later."

The study also recommended the need for treatment studies focusing on attachment and for more research on the significance of attachment between children and their fathers.

Why does this happen? Well, the way that mothers treat their children directly correlates with the way their mothers treated them.

For example, one study found that mothers who felt that they were accepted and supported by their own mothers as kids went on to have balanced relationships with their own children; they were more sensitive to their child's needs and less intrusive.

But if it makes you feel any better, we humans aren't the only creatures who have trouble with our attachments.

In a recent paper published in the journal Current Biology, Michael Weiss, the research director at the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Washington, and his colleagues looked back across four decades of life history records of Southern Resident killer whales in the Pacific Northwest and noticed a clear trend.

"Killer whale mothers pay a really huge cost to take care of their sons," says Weiss. That cost is that they have fewer offspring. "And they do this throughout their son's life and never really stop paying that cost to keep their sons alive."

In fact, when a mom dies, her son usually perishes within the next year or two. "We think that is largely because they're seeing a huge reduction in the amount of food they get," Weiss explains.