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.
The new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to
show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy
are linked to a mother’s nurturing.
Their research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
“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. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry. “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.”
Read more here.
10 Ways to Nurture Your Child
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