Jan. 30, 2012 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." The brain-imaging
study involved c