Mom's nurture can turbo-charge preschoolers' brain growth

This Mother’s Day, many moms across the nation will receive crayon scribbles, construction paper bracelets, and dandelion bouquets from their young children, and the oohs and ahhs and hugs and kisses they give back could have a lasting impact on their little ones’ brain development.

A new research study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates moms who nurture their preschoolers can actually boost the brain growth of their children.

Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis conducted an 11-year longitudinal study of 127 children. The researchers assessed maternal support during the preschool years and again when the children were school-age by videoing and coding mother-child interactions.

During the preschool assessment, researchers required the children to wait eight minutes before they could open a brightly wrapped gift sitting within reach while the mother completed a questionnaire. The researchers analyzed the strategies the mothers used to help their children regulate the impulse to open the gift before the eight minutes was up. To assess support, the researchers looked for things such as moms’ responding in a calm, positive, and reassuring manner to their child’s emotional expressions and, when the child was upset, doing things like moving closer and rubbing the child’s back.

During the school assessment, the researchers gave the child five minutes to put a puzzle of the United States together within an enclosed box so the child could not see the puzzle pieces. The mothers could see the pieces, and researchers told them to instruct their children on where to put each piece. The researchers again assessed the mothers’ interactions for supportive, encouraging, and positive responses.

The children were 3 to nearly 6 years old when the study began, and the researchers assessed them for behavioral and emotional development once a year for six years. They also administered MRI brain scans to the children every 18 months from age 7 to 10.

The results indicated that children from school-age to adolescence whose mothers had been particularly supportive and nurturing during the preschool years had significant increases in the size of the hippocampus region of their brains and showed higher levels of emotional functioning that carried on through adolescence.

The hippocampus is a key area of the brain that impacts learning, memory, and emotional functioning. There did not seem to be any difference in the size of the hippocampus for children whose mothers became more supportive during the school years, suggesting preschool is a sensitive time period in which maternal nurturing can have a particularly powerful effect.

“The parent-child relationship during the preschool period is vital, even more important than when the child gets older,” said researcher Joan Luby, a Washington University child psychiatrist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. “We think that’s due to greater plasticity in the brain when kids are younger, meaning that the brain is affected more by experiences very early in life.”