Thebrain 9 development
“We found a very strong relationship between maternal nurturing and the size of the hippocampus in the healthy children,” she says.Īlthough 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver - whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents. What did surprise her was that nurturing made such a big difference in mentally healthy children. Luby says the smaller volumes in depressed children might be expected because studies in adults have shown the same results. Having a hippocampus that’s almost 10 percent larger just provides concrete evidence of nurturing’s powerful effect.” This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing. “But most of those studies have looked at psychosocial factors or school performance. “For years studies have underscored the importance of an early, nurturing environment for good, healthy outcomes for children,” Luby says. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. The study didn’t observe parents and children in their homes or repeat stressful exercises, but other studies of child development have used similar methods as valid measurements of whether parents tend to be nurturers when they interact with their children.įor the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. Rather, it was based on their behavior and the extent to which they nurtured their child under these challenging conditions.” “Whether a parent was considered a nurturer was not based on that parent’s own self-assessment. How much or how little the parent was able to support and nurture the child in this stressful circumstance - which was designed to approximate the stresses of daily parenting - was evaluated by raters who knew nothing about the child’s health or the parent’s temperament. That study involved children, ages 3 to 6, who had symptoms of depression, other psychiatric disorders or were mentally healthy with no known psychiatric problems.Īs part of the initial study, the children were closely observed and videotaped interacting with a parent, almost always a mother, as the parent was completing a required task, and the child was asked to wait to open an attractive gift. The brain-imaging study involved children ages 7 to 10 who had participated in an earlier study of preschool depression that Luby and her colleagues began about a decade ago. “I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.” “This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings,” says lead author Joan L. Their research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Louis, is the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing. The new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St.
School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress. (Credit: Washington University School of Medicine) Their mothers early in life have a larger hippocampus than children who were not nurtured as much.
New research shows that children who were nurtured by The hippocampus (highlighted in fuchsia) is a keyīrain structure important to learning, memory and stress response.