Wk 3 Blog Assignment: Research that Benefits Children and Families—Uplifting Stories
Option 1:
Share a positive example of the effects of research on children and/or families: Perhaps you can provide real-life examples of research benefits to children and/or families; maybe you are familiar with stories of people who have been positively affected by research; or you came across a published research article concerning children or families which you find exciting and would like to share with your colleagues.
Hello colleagues!
Because I am a new mom,
I was touched by the following research. I hope all of you enjoy reading this
just as much as I did. Enjoy!
How a Mother's Love Changes a Child's Brain
By: Joseph Castro, LiveScience Staff
Writer
Nurturing a child early in life may help him or her develop a
larger hippocampus, the brain region important for learning, memory and stress
responses, a new study shows.
Previous animal research showed that early maternal support has
a positive effect on a young rat's hippocampal growth, production of brain
cells and ability to deal with stress. Studies in
human children, on the other hand, found a connection between early social
experiences and the volume of the amygdala, which helps regulate the processing
and memory of emotional reactions. Numerous studies also have found that
children raised in a nurturing environment typically do better in school and
are more emotionally developed than their non-nurtured peers.
Brain images have now revealed that a mother’s love physically affects the
volume of her child’s hippocampus. In the study, children of nurturing mothers
had hippocampal volumes 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not
as nurturing. Research has suggested a link between a larger hippocampus and
better memory.
"We can now say with confidence that the psychosocial
environment has a material impact on the way the human brain develops,"
said Dr. Joan Luby, the study's lead researcher and a psychiatrist at the
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo. "It puts a very
strong wind behind the sail of the idea that early nurturing of children
positively affects their development."
The research is part of an ongoing project to track the development
of children with early onset depression. As part of the
project, Luby and her colleagues previously measured the maternal support that
children — who were ages 3 to 6 and had either symptoms of depression, other
psychiatric disorders or no mental health problems — received during a
so-called "waiting task."
The researchers placed mother and child in a room along with an attractively
wrapped gift and a survey that the mother had to fill out. The children were
told they could not open the present until five minutes had passed — basically
until their mothers had finished the survey. A group of psychiatrists, who knew
nothing about the children's health or the parents' temperaments, rated the
amount of support the mothers gave to their children.
A mother who was very supportive, for example, would console her
child, explaining that the child had only a few more minutes to wait and that
she understands the situation was frustrating. "The task recapitulates
what everyday life is like," Luby told LiveScience, meaning that it gives
researchers an idea of how much support the child receives at home.
Now, four years later, the researchers gave MRI (magnetic
resonance imaging) scans to 92 children who underwent the waiting task.
Compared with non-depressed children with high maternal support, non-depressed
children with low support had 9.2 percent smaller hippocampal volumes, while depressed children with high and low
support had 6.0 and 10.6 percent smaller volumes, respectively.
Though 95 percent of the parents in the study were the
children's biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of
nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver.
Luby and her team will continue following the children as they
grow older, and plan to see how other brain regions are affected by parental
nurturing during preschool years.
"It's now clear that a caregiver's nurturing is not only
good for the development of the child, but it actually physically changes the
brain," Luby said.
Reference
Here is the link:
