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Mom's love good for Children's Brains
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.
Read Summary here. Read full text: Maternal support in early childhood predicts larger hippocampal volumes at school age
The importance of maternal nurtuing has been long proven for rats and primates, and now we know that children who experience nurturing in their early years have a larger hippocampus, by 10%. This is actually a followup study on a study on depression in preschoolers when they were ages 3 to 5. Brain images of these same children were taken when they were between 7 and 10. They evaluated the degree of maternal nuturance when the children were younger and compared the results to the brain imaging. . This study suggests a clear link between nurturing and the size of the hippocampus.
What's the hippocampus? One of the most important parts of the human brain especially since it sits right in the middle of our animal brain (limbic system) which is involved in managing emotion, threat detection, behavior, motivation and memory. Amy Fuller PhD
Hat tip to Donald Cooper for posting this on the Achieve Balance Linked Group.
Read Summary here. Read full text: Maternal support in early childhood predicts larger hippocampal volumes at school age