Parenting Might Actually Keep Your Brain Young, According To A New Study
It might not feel like it, but look at the science!
Kids are rather adept at making you feel old as hell. They just love to say things like, “What’s a VHS?” and “Mom, what was it like to grow up in the 1900s?” And, yeah, they are most likely the cause of some stress-induced graying. But, it turns out that, while they might make you feel geriatric, they’re actually helping to keep your brain young.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that parenthood appears to have a protective effect on brain function, and that the impact even increases with each child.
The effect was observed in both mothers and fathers, leading the researchers to conclude that the caregiving environment itself is the most likely cause, rather than pregnancy or other biological factors.
Using data from the UK Biobank — the largest population-based neuroimaging study to date — researchers from from Yale, Rutgers and the University of Singapore analyzed brain scans from over 19,000 females and over 17,000 males, ranging from 40 to 69 years old. They compared the number of children each participant parented with the connectivity in various areas of the brain.
Communication between different parts of the brain decreases with age, impacting physical and cognitive abilities over time. However, the researchers found that parents tended to have “younger-looking” brains with higher levels of connectivity, particularly in the areas responsible for movement, sensation and social connection — and, the effect was magnified with each additional child.
Is this an advertisement to have another kid? Maybe!
The researchers were careful to note that they found an association between parenthood and brain connectivity, but there is still work to be done to determine the mechanism by which the increased connectivity occurs. It could be a be benefit of social connection (parenthood is associated with a higher number of friend and family visits), or of support provided by children to their aging parents. Or, maybe it’s just the wonderfully unpredictable nature of parenting itself.
“The increased novelty, complexity, and cognitive challenge inherent in the caregiving environment may provide a form of environmental enrichment for parents, which when sustained across the lifespan, might be beneficial for neural and cognitive resilience in later life,” the researchers wrote.
More research will have to be done to determine the underlying mechanism affecting parents’ brain connectivity, and the study must also be replicated using different populations. But, it still takes a big step towards dispelling the notion that parenting is a stressor on the brain — it certainly is stressful, but your noggin could actually benefit in the longterm!
