School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial to learning, memory and responses to stress.
A mother’s love is legendary for its power and protection. However, this new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to show that changes the hippocampus are linked to a mother’s nurturing.
“This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings,” says lead researcher Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry.
“I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.”
Study participants had been involved in previous research of depression in preschool-aged children, which began about 10 years ago. That study involved children, ages 3 to 6, who had symptoms of depression or other psychiatric disorders compared to those who were mentally healthy with no known psychiatric problems.
The children had been closely observed and videotaped while interacting with a parent, almost always a mother. The parent’s ability to support and nurture the child in a stressful circumstance was objectively evaluated by others with no knowledge of the child’s health or the parent’s temperament.
To reach the current conclusions, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of those children. 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.
This is the first study to demonstrate a powerful, positive, anatomical change in the brain, which essentially validates the very large body of early childhood development literature emphasizing the importance of early parenting and nurturing.
The smaller hippocampus was no surprise because studies in depressed adults have had the same results. However, the very strong relationship between maternal nurturing and the size of the hippocampus in the healthy children was a striking surprise.
Although 95 percent of the parents 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.
Citation: Maternal support in early childhood predicts larger hippocampal volumes at school age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition, Jan. 30, 2012. Luby, L.J., et al.
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