Parenthood can protect your brain from some effects of aging, a new study from Rutgers Health and Yale University found.
The study of nearly 37,000 adults found that parents show patterns of brain connectivity that counter typical age-related changes in the brain.
It also found that with each additional child, the effect gets stronger.
Both mothers and fathers in the study showed these trends, suggesting that the benefits come from the experience of parenting rather than biological changes from pregnancy, a news release by the institute says.
Senior study author Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a core faculty member of both the Rutgers Brain Health Institute and the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research, said that the regions of the brain that lose functional connectivity as people age are the same regions that are associated with increased connectivity for parents.
The research analyzed brain scans and family information from the U.K. Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database.
The analysis found that parents with more children tended to have stronger brain connectivity in key brain networks, especially the ones related to movement and sensation.
“We’re seeing a widespread pattern of functional alterations, where a higher number of children parented is associated with increased functional connectivity across somatosensory and motor networks,” Holmes said.
A professor at the University of Toronto and director of a cognitive neuroscience lab who also runs a neuroimaging facility, Morgan Barense, thinks this finding is based on the caregiving quality of parenthood.
“Parenting is also associated with an incredibly rich environment, both within your home and with in terms of the connections that you make, and that can have really profound and positive implications on the brain,” she told CTVNews.ca.
“Our brain is probably the most complex network in the universe. And the way that we’re able to achieve the cognitive functions is by brain regions talking together, being connected and working in concert in highly specialized and specific ways.”
Barense said she found that the most telling aspect of the study was that the brains of the people who had more children looked younger.
The results and the effects are driven by a caregiving environment, Barense told CTVNews.ca.
She says highly sensory motor activities like touching, holding, comforting, eye contact and social connection give constant feedback, which implicates social cognition.
As a parent it gets difficult to be completely isolated, Barense says. And social connections are the best things you can do for your brain.
However, these results can be mimicked by people who aren’t parents but are caregivers in some capacity too, she says.
“A leading hypothesis would be that it’s a stimulating environment both on a cognitive, sensory and physical level, and one can replicate that by care,” Barense said.
The brain shapes itself around the input it receives, so if it doesn’t get the necessary enrichment, it will degrade, according to her.
Meanwhile, the researchers have cautioned that there is more to learn and understand about exactly how parenting creates these brain changes.
Additionally, since the study participants were localized to the U.K., the findings may not generalize to all cultures and family structures and the research could have implications beyond parent-child relationships.
“If what we’re picking up is a relationship between enhanced social interactions and social support that comes about through having increased numbers of children in your life, then that means that we could tap into those same processes even if individuals don’t have a social support network currently,” Holmes said.
