As parents we know that we play a vital and necessary role in our children’s lives. Their mental and physical well-being is dependent on us from pregnancy and on, arguably through adulthood.
According to CNN Health, there was a new study reported in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Science that now definitely shows that parental roles not only help shape the hearts and minds of their children but also the actual growth of their brains.
The study was conducted on 92 kids between the ages of 3 and 6. They videotaped each child with a parent (almost all mothers) completing a mildly stressful task meant to approximate the stress of daily parenting. The researchers observed the interaction between child and parent to see how nurturing and supportive the relationship was. Several years later the children had their Hippocampus measured using a MRI.
This study found that the children with the more nurturing parent had significantly larger Hippocampi than those children with less supportive parent.
Size matters when it comes to the Hippocampus as the smaller the size the greater the risk for depression, post traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s, among other problems. Stressors in life can also shrink the Hippocampus. This small section of the brain plays a vital part in processing memories and in controlling how we deal with stress and inflammatory responses.
We innately know that we have a huge impact on our children by how we relate, nurture, support and love them; however, we are now learning that it’s not just emotional but also a physical impact on how their brains grow and operate.
