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Research in this WellBeing Natural Health & Living News item was sourced from: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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Parental love builds brains

23 February 2012

No one would dispute the importance to a child of their parent’s love. Without any other consideration just the sense of protection and the security of being nourished physically is essential. What a new study has shown however, is that parental love can actually affect the size of a crucial part of your child’s brain.

To establish this researchers used videos of mothers interacting with their children aged between three and six years old. Those original videos were taken as part of a study into preschool depression. In that study the kids were watched and videotaped while their parents were busy completing an unfinished project. The children had been told that they had to wait before opening a present. The amount of help and support the parents were able to give their children was assessed by impartial observers.

The parents themselves were under a challenge in this study but it served to test how strongly they nurtured their child when other things were happening, as is often the case in daily life.

To follow this up, the researchers found the children involved in the study when they were aged between seven and ten years and took images of their brains. The results showed that children who had more nurturing parents had a hippocampus that was up to ten per cent bigger than other children.

The hippocampus is part of the limbic system in the brain and is involved in grouping together information from short term memory and transforming it into long term memory. The hippocampus is also involved in helping the brain to deal with stress. So a loving mother and father leads to a bigger hippocampus, better coping with stress, improved memory, and optimal learning.

Next time you see your mum or your dad, give them a hug and say, “Thanks for my mega-hippocampus!” They won’t know what the hell you are talking about but they’ll take the hug.