Study links positive parenting to brain response and mental health joy

A new study led by the University of Notre Dame finds that positive parenting teaches children how to experience joy and could lead to better mental health. Psychologists have long maintained that how parents raise their children during their early years has a major impact on their mental health and happiness as they grow up. This research identifies one of the largest neural indicators of risk for mental health concerns known to date regarding early parenting behaviors.

More than one in five adults in the US experience mental illness each year, according to data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Additionally more than one in seven young people ages 6–17 experience a mental health disorder. Fifty percent of all lifetime mental illness begins by age 14 and 75% by age 24.

Notre Dame psychologist Kaylin Hill has devoted the past 15 years of her career to better understanding emotions and depression. Her research appears in Communications Psychology and focuses on how to reduce the burden of depression on individuals and families. Hill is an assistant professor in Notre Dame's Department of Psychology and a faculty affiliate with its Shaw Center for Children and Families.

This longitudinal study spanned 15 years and included 465 young people and their parents at Stony Brook University in New York. The research team began by observing one-on-one interactions between 3-year-old children and their parents in the laboratory. They then compared those observations with the development of neural reward responsiveness in those same children at ages 9, 12, 15 and 18.

The scientists used an electroencephalogram to track reward processing at the brain level throughout the study. This device uses small electrodes attached to the scalp through a cap to record the brain's electrical activity during tasks. In this study researchers used money as the reward for winning a guessing game to look at signals in response to a win versus a loss.

Their findings indicated that children who experienced higher levels of positive parenting got more excited about winning the money. Conversely children raised with a more negative parenting style were less enthusiastic about rewards. What researchers saw is that the more positive parenting behaviors observed at age 3, the larger the brain's reward response seemed to be across adolescence.

Hill notes that while this study was observational it gives important clues for how experiences and development may unfold over time. Current research indicates that the most reliable predictor of depression is family history paired with a stressful life event. She says behaviors are much more open to intervention than a genetic explanation for risk within families.