BC Council for Families

by Ruby Banga
Program Coodinator

Can love change your brain?  With only a week to go before Valentine’s Day, it seems like a natural time to ask that question, and for the love-struck among us, the answer seems natural too: of course it can!
 
Indeed, a recent study published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers proof that love does change our brains.  But the study focused on children, not dating singles, and the brain-changing love was parental love.  It turns out that children who receive more nurturing in their early years  have brains with a larger hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial for learning, memory and the ability to cope with stress.
 
This fascinating, first-of-its-kind research demonstrates the link between a nurturing caregiver and increased development in a critical part of a child’s brain. The study, which was conducted by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University in St. Louis, studied brain-images of 92 children ages 7 to 10, and found that some children had a hippocampus up to 10% larger than those of children whose mothers were found to be less nurturing.
 
Parents’ levels of nurturing were evaluated by researchers through observations of parent-child interactions as preschool children and their parents were asked to wait for 10 minutes before opening a brightly-wrapped gift.  Parents who used supportive strategies to encourage their children to wait patiently before opening the gift were assessed as more nurturing than parents who used authoritarian or punitive strategies. Parents and children were assessed on four different occasions over the course of the study.
 
Lead author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry at Washington University concluded that  “the public health implications [of this study] 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.”
 
"This finding, when replicated, would strongly suggest enhancement of public policies and programs that provide support and parenting education to caregivers early in development."

So here’s a Valentine’s Day suggestion for all of us — send a card to your parents, whose love and nurturing helped change your brain — for the better!