It makes sense to me…
“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, psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO, and head researcher of the study that is a larger part of a larger project tracking the development of early onset depression in children.
Vanguard theories of psychology has fairly unanimously asserted and demonstrated that the psychosocial environment of an individual affects that person’s emotions.
The majority of us who have spent any significant amount of time in psychotherapy as a client have filled our share of hours discussing how interactions with family members at home influence how we feel.
And for those of us who have worked with psychotherapists who adhere to more classical theories of personality development, many of those house during which we talked about family relations focused not so much on our interactions with husbands, wives and children, but our early life–our time as children, young children, and living with our parents.
It does not take much self-reflection and introspection to gain the wisdom to realize that what we all underwent as children, starting with those early years that few of us can remember, and going through to the year we reached the age of legal consent, 18-years-old, enormously impacts how we perceive the world others and ourselves in relation to the world and others.
It is very difficult for a person to imagine her or himself gaining success and achieving pointed goals as an adult without ever having undergone any experience of success at reaching a chosen goal during childhood.
Until now we believed this challenge, if not inability lay with our emotions and thoughts, those centered on the absence of failure to establish a track record, ever how small or short, at setting a goal and then reaching it.
Dr. Luby and her colleagues submit, “…that early nurturing of children positively affects their development…” concluding that, “…a caregiver’s nurturing is not only good for the development of the child, but it actually physically changes the brain,”
Their research of observing how children, ages 3 to 6 years-old coped when given a waiting task focused on the mother’s ability and level of nurturing the child during the 5 minutes of waiting while the mother carried out her own task.
This is so much like life. Children hate to wait. And we mothers expend a lot of energy coaxing and supporting them in not only waiting, but from a long range perspective, assisting them to discover and devise ways to self-soothe.
Much of adulthood is spent waiting, in lines like those at the bank, in traffic, in anticipation of that call about the job for which applied or the birth of the child growing inside us.
Life consists of a continual slide show of movement and stops.
One’s ability to learn how to make beneficial use of these moments when we must “sit still,” plays as important a role in the over all success of matriculating through life as does the ability to assert one’s presence and attend our needs.
MRI scans of the brains given four years later to children involved in the study showed in those children identified as non-depressed, and who received a low amount of support and encouragement from their mothers during the 5-minute waiting task, to possess a smaller hippocampus than those non-depressed children whose mothers gave a high amount of support.
The hippocampus is a region of the human brain that plays an integral role in learning, memory, and the way we respond to stress.
Comparing the size of the hippocampus in children identified as non-depressed and who received a high amount of support from mothers to the size of the hippocampus of depressed children revealed more glaring differences that increased as mothers offered less support during the waiting task.
MRI scans of non-depressed children who received much support from their mothers during the waiting task showed these children to possess a hippocampus 9.2 percent larger than the hippocampus of non-depressed children who received little support from their mothers, and a hippocampus 10.6 percent larger than that of depressed children who, likewise received a low amount of support from their mothers.
Quite interestingly, the hippocampus of non-depressed children who received a high level of maternal support was but 6 percent larger than that of depressed children who received a high level of maternal support and encouragement.
The level of support demonstrated and given by the mother evidenced itself through results of MRI scans as the variable influencing and deciding how well or poorly a child fared, aside from and beyond their emotional state and mental health.
Even when our child/children struggle with aspects of life beyond their control, suffer illnesses, both physical and emotional, and that can temporarily debilitate them, or sadly present a chronic challenge that requires daily attention, our constant love and support as a mother, demonstrated through acts of soothing patience enable and endow our children with a capacity to cope that ideally lives beyond us, as we hope and pray they will do.
To paraphrase Dr. Luby as stated in the article, How a Mother’s Love Changes a Child’s Brain, “…Nurturing a child early in life may help him or her develop…[increased capacity and ability] for learning, memory, and [handling] stress responses.