The new research, by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing.

Their research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

“This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings,” says first author Joan L. Luby, MD. “I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents’ nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development.”

The brain-imaging study involved children ages 7 to 10 who had participated in an earlier study of preschool depression that Luby and her colleagues began about a decade ago. That study involved children, ages 3 to 6, who had symptoms of depression, other psychiatric disorders or were mentally healthy with no known psychiatric problems.

As part of the initial study, the children were closely observed and videotaped interacting with a parent, almost always a mother, as the parent was completing a required task, and the child was asked to wait to open an attractive gift. How much or how little the parent was able to support and nurture the child in this stressful circumstance — which was designed to approximate the stresses of daily parenting — was evaluated by raters who knew nothing about the child’s health or the parent’s temperament.

“It’s very objective,” says Luby, professor of child psychiatry. “Whether a parent was considered a nurturer was not based on that parent’s own self-assessment. Rather, it was based on their behavior and the extent to which they nurtured their child under these challenging conditions.”

The study didn’t observe parents and children in their homes or repeat stressful exercises, but other studies of child development have used similar methods as valid measurements of whether parents tend to be nurturers when they interact with their children.

For the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger that children whose mothers were not as nurturing.

“For years studies have underscored the importance of an early, nurturing environment for good, healthy outcomes for children,” Luby says. “But most of those studies have looked at psychosocial factors or school performance. This study, to my knowledge, is the first that actually shows an anatomical change in the brain, which really provides validation for the very large body of early childhood development literature that had been highlighting the importance of early parenting and nurturing. Having a hippocampus that’s almost 10 percent larger just provides concrete evidence of nurturing’s powerful effect.”

Luby says the smaller volumes in depressed children might be expected because studies in adults have shown the same results. What did surprise her was that nurturing made such a big difference in mentally healthy children.

“We found a very strong relationship between maternal nurturing and the size of the hippocampus in the healthy children,” she says.

Although 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same, for any primary caregiver — whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents.

The fact that the researchers found a larger hippocampus in the healthy children who were nurtured is striking, Luby says, because the hippocampus is such an important brain structure.

When the body faces stresses, the brain activates the autonomic nervous system, an involuntary system of nerves that controls the release of stress hormones. Those hormones help us cope with stress by increasing the heart rate and helping the body adapt. The hippocampus is the main brain structure involved in that response. It’s also key in learning and memory, and larger volumes would suggest a link to improved performance in school, among other things.

Past animal studies have indicated that a nurturing mother can influence brain development, and many studies in human children have identified improvements in school performance and healthier development in children raised in a nurturing environment. But until now, there has not been solid evidence linking a nurturing parent to changes in brain anatomy in children.

“Studies in rats have shown that maternal nurturance, specifically in the form of licking, produces changes in genes that then produce changes in receptors that increase the size of the hippocampus,” Luby says. “That phenomenon has been replicated in primates, but it hasn’t really been clear whether the same thing happens in humans. Our study suggests a clear link between nurturing and the size of the hippocampus.”

She says educators who work with families who have young children may improve school performance and child development by not only teaching parents to work on particular tasks with their children but by showing parents how to work with their children.

“Parents should be taught how to nurture and support their children. Those are very important elements in healthy development,” Luby says.

Poor schools even influence how parental education protects kids from becoming overweight.

“It was once thought that family income was the main factor when we talk about the research on adolescent weight,” said Molly Martin, assistant professor of sociology and demography. “That’s not true. The environments the children live in play a key role in weight problems among adolescents.”

Martin said that the level of a school’s financial resources significantly predicted adolescent weight problems, but the average education level of the parents for students in those schools did not.

The researchers said that students with well-educated parents are less likely to be overweight. However, the effect of having a better-educated parent is minimized if the student attends a poor school, said Michelle Frisco, associate professor of sociology and demography.

A parent with a graduate degree and who has a child in a poor school is more likely to raise an overweight adolescent than a parent with an eighth grade education who has an adolescent enrolled in a rich school, according to researchers.

“The environment can actually limit our ability to make the choices that we all think we make freely,” said Frisco.

Many experts believe that well-educated parents can use more tools to help their children maintain a healthy weight, despite environmental pressures, Martin said. For instance, they can recognize health issues associated with being overweight and are more comfortable communicating with doctors. Well-educated parents can also teach their children about nutrition and food choices.

The researchers, who report their findings in the current issue of Social Science and Medicine, analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that included information about 16,133 students in 132 schools.

Poor schools may influence overweight adolescents in several ways beyond providing the unhealthy food choices at cafeterias that are typically blamed for adolescents being overweight, said Martin.

According to Martin and Frisco, who worked with Claudia Nau, a graduate student in sociology, and Kristin Burnett, of the U.S. Census Bureau, poor schools may not have the resources to pay for athletic and fitness programs. Better-funded schools may offer food choices that are unhealthy, but they may also have the means to provide additional healthy food options, such as vegetarian dishes, while schools with limited resources may rely more on vending machine income.

Stress also may play a role in the weight gain of students at poor schools.

“Schools with limited financial resources tend to be more stressful environments,” said Martin. “Stress promotes weight gains and usually the worst kinds of weight gains.” Stress tends to promote excess weight gain in the midsection, which is associated with such health problems as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

When presented with scenarios that could possibly but not obviously indicate child abuse, 2,109 physicians from across the United States who participated in the study were most likely to suspect maltreatment rather than accident for white children from families with low socioeconomic status than for black children with low socioeconomic status or for either black or white children of high socioeconomic status.

These findings contradict previous studies that linked differentiated diagnosis to race, reporting increased likelihood to consider abuse in black patients.

The new study appears online in advance of publication in the Journal of Pediatrics.

“It is possible that we were able to determine that socioeconomic status has a more significant impact on the physician’s diagnosis than race, when previous studies did not see this, because most of these earlier studies did not include a significant number of low-income white patients and thus were unable to evaluate the influence of family income level,” said Antoinette Laskey, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine, a Regenstrief Institute affiliated scientist and a physician with Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health and with Wishard Health Services.

Even among pediatricians with expertise in child abuse evaluations, broad variability exists in determination of abuse.

“Interactions with patients are driven by past experiences and stereotypes. Neither are necessarily negative,” Dr. Laskey said. “Past experiences provide valuable information. A stereotype is a rule of thumb, such as ‘police are authority figures and should be obeyed’ or ‘a hooded figure who walks toward you in the dark should be considered a potential threat,’ that helps us categorize complicated environments. It is important to understand what stereotypes — socioeconomic status, as we found in this study — influence physician decision-making.”

Her next study investigates the multiple factors that drive physician decision-making in child neglect situations as the health care team determines whether an incident was a tragic accident or was avoidable.

Drawing from 29 years of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), Quesnel-Vallée and co-author Miles Taylor, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida State University, looked at pathways between a parent’s education level and their children’s education level, household income and depressive symptoms.

The team found that higher levels of parental education meant fewer mental health issues for their adult children.

“However, we also found much of that association may be due to the fact that parents with more education tend to have children with more education and better paying jobs themselves,” explained Quesnel-Vallée. “What this means is that the whole process of climbing up the social ladder that is rooted in a parent’s education is a crucial pathway for the mental health of adult children.”

These findings suggest that policies aimed at increasing educational opportunities for all, regardless of social background, may help break the intergenerational cycle of low socioeconomic status and poor mental health. “Children don’t get to choose where they come from. I think we have a responsibility to address health inequalities borne out of the conditions of early childhood,” said Quesnel-Vallée.

The paper “Socioeconomic Pathways to Depressive Symptoms in Adulthood: Evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979” was recently published in the Journal Social Science & Medicine.

In a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, Brandeis psychologist Margie Lachman with Gregory Miller and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles reveal that while children raised in families with low socioeconomic status (SES) frequently go on to have high rates of chronic illness in adulthood, a sizable minority remain healthy across the life course. The research sought to examine if parental nurturance could mitigate the effects of childhood disadvantage.

Lachman, the Minnie and Harold Fierman Professor of Psychology, and director of the Lifespan Initiative on Healthy Aging, says that her team is working to understand the sources of social disparities in health and what can be done to reduce them. Funded by the National Institute on Aging as part of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, this information will then be used to empower families through education.

“The literature is very clear that people who are low in socioeconomic status have worse health than their same age counterparts,” says Lachman, a phenomenon called the social gradient in health. “Modifiable factors play an important role, and we are realizing that things can be done to try to minimize these health disparities.”

Clearly money and health care access are part of it, she says, but numerous studies show they play  a very small role, as countries with universal health care have the same social gradient.

While they have looked at income in other studies, the team has found that the level of educational attainment is a more reliable indicator of socioeconomic status; people who have a college education do well in many areas, such as physical health, psychological well-being and cognitive function. Her team is looking for ways to reduce the differences, as not all lower-socioeconomic status people fare the same — some, Lachman says, are physically and cognitively active and have good social support, resources which seems to reduce their risks for poorer functioning.

The study is innovative in several ways. Other studies look at SES in adulthood and link it with self-reports of health. This study looked at SES during childhood and whether it predicted poor health many years later. The study also examined risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes within the context of a large survey.

More than 1,000 members of the nationally representative sample were brought to a medical clinic for an overnight stay and samples were taken to assess pre-clinical indicators of disease. To qualify for a metabolic syndrome diagnosis, which is a precursor to coronary artery disease, Type 2 diabetes and stroke, adults had to have central adiposity (large waist circumference) and at least two of the following: high blood pressure, raised triglycerides, raised fasting glucose levels, or low levels of high-density lipoprotein (a specific cholesterol reading).

Emerging literature reveals that many of the health problems in midlife, including metabolic syndrome, can be traced back to what happened in early childhood. The stresses of childhood can leave a biological residue that shows up in midlife, explains Lachman. Yet, among those at risk for poor health, adults who had nurturing mothers in childhood fared better in physical health in midlife.

“Perhaps it’s a combination of empathy, the teaching of coping strategies or support for enrichment,” says Lachman. “We want to understand what it is about having a nurturing mother that allows you to escape the vulnerabilities of being in a low socioeconomic status background and wind up healthier than your counterparts.”

The study has followed the same 1,205 people for over a decade. Nurturance was assessed with data and included questions such as: How much did she understand your problems and worries and how much time and attention did she give you when you needed it?

“We would like to try to use this information to bolster vulnerable families who are at risk for not doing well,” says Lachman. “Teaching them parenting skills to show children concern for their welfare, how to cope with stress, that they have some control over their destinies, and how to engage in health-promoting behaviors such as good diet and exercise — the things that could protect against metabolic syndrome.”

There still may be steps that can be taken later in life to reduce risk for those who are vulnerable, Lachman says.

Interestingly, in this study, paternal nurturing did not contribute to resilience.

“It could be that the results are tied to the particular cohort studied, and there may be generational differences,” says Lachman. “With this cohort, people who are now in midlife, fathers weren’t typically very involved. Paternal nurturance may play more of a role for the children of these midlife fathers who, in contrast, are more involved in the lives of their children and perhaps more nurturant.”

As the study continues they will be able to look at new generations of middle-aged adults who have had different parenting experiences.

“The fact that we can see these long-term effects from childhood into midlife is pretty dramatic,” says Lachman. “Yet this study is just one small piece of this overall puzzle. The more modifiable factors that can be identified, the more likely it is that we will be able to intervene successfully to optimize health.”

But now a Michigan State University scholar is refuting that theory.

In her research, Desiree Baolian Qin – who, like Chua, is a Chinese mother – found that high-achieving Chinese students were more depressed and anxious than their white counterparts. And contrary to the tiger mother philosophy, Qin said, a child’s happiness is vitally important.

“I strongly believe that happiness matters tremendously for children to develop well, so they don’t just have success now and then later on experience maladjustment,” said Qin, assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. “It’s really important for parents to pay attention to this.”

In her best-selling book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chua, a Yale Law School professor, created a firestorm of controversy for her hardline parenting. In the book, Chua describes how she demanded straight A’s from her two daughters and drilled them for hours every day on the piano and violin. The girls were not allowed to watch TV, be in a school play or have a play date with friends.

Qin called these restrictions “ridiculous.” She said she and her husband, Tom Buffett, would never keep their daughters – Olivia, 4, and Helena, 2 – from having play dates or other activities that build social and emotional skills.

“Children need the ability to work well with other people, to relate,” Qin said. “I feel strongly that I won’t raise my kids just toward success at the cost of other things. More than anything, I want them to be well-rounded, emotionally healthy kids.”

Qin was raised in rural China by her grandparents, whom she described as “fairly lenient.”  She came to the United States in 1996 to attend Harvard University, where she earned a doctorate in human development and psychology. She now lives in East Lansing with her family.

In a recent talk at the Asian American Psychological Association Convention in Washington, D.C., Qin compared Chua’s hard-driving parenting style with the often “soft” and “forgiving” Western approach. The lecture was titled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Chinese Tiger Mothers but Were Afraid to Ask.”

Qin believes the overall negative reaction to Chua’s book was unfair and that there are some themes Western parents can learn from. For example, she said many parents in the United States are so worried about injuring their children’s self-esteem, they overpraise.

“I agree with Amy Chua that a child will develop strong self-esteem when they really master something,” Qin said. “So that self-esteem should be grounded in their achievements, their ability, rather than empty praises from parents and teachers saying ‘great job’ for drawing a circle or ‘great job’ for just about anything.”

Qin said there’s nothing wrong with having high expectations for your children. The problem often comes in the way those expectations are communicated.

In a study that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Qin found that Chinese immigrant parents constantly pester their children to excel – a longstanding practice in their native China. This includes comparing the child to siblings – as in, “Your sister got straight A’s and went to Harvard, why can’t you?”

In another paper, to be published in the Journal of Adolescence, Qin found that Chinese students are more depressed and have lower self-esteem and more anxiety than white students. The findings are based on survey data from nearly 500 high-achieving students at a prestigious East Coast high school.

Qin said the majority of Asian American children come from immigrant families where parents face additional challenges in raising their kids. While the children attend U.S. schools and tend to learn English faster, the parents often work with fellow immigrants in Chinese-run businesses and thus are far less influenced by American culture, she said.

This issue, which researchers call the acculturation gap, can lead to alienation and conflict within families, and could become more widespread as the immigrant population grows, Qin said. Currently, about 20 percent of children in the United States have at least one immigrant parent – a number that’s predicted to jump to 33 percent by the year 2040.

Ultimately, Qin said, “There is a healthy middle ground between the parenting extremes of the East and West. What is most beneficial to children, regardless of the culture, is clear and high expectations in a warm and loving family environment.”

“It’s about the perception of the child’s illness,” said Valerie Toly from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. She is the lead researcher on the study, “A Longitudinal Study of Families with Technology-Dependent Children,” in the journal of Research in Nursing & Health.

Toly’s research is one of the first longitudinal studies to see how families function and reach normalcy once children leave the hospital equipped with technology to keep them alive. She studied 82 mothers, recruited during visits to a hospital’s specialty clinic.

The mothers were interviewed and given six surveys after leaving the hospital, and then again 12 months later to track changes in the mother’s psychological wellbeing, family functioning and normalcy.

The mothers—primarily Caucasian (79 percent), African-American (17 percent), Hispanic (6 percent) and Asian (2 percent)—ranged in age from 22 to 66. About 75 percent had some college education, a third worked full time and 75 percent had other children, some of whom also are technology dependent.

About a third of the mothers tested for clinical depression, and that percentage increased by 7 percent at the second visit. (Mothers with high levels of depression were provided mental health resource information.)

At the beginning of the study, children ranged in age from 6.75 months to 16.83 years, with an average age of 6.41 years. Nearly half of the children had medical issues related to neuromuscular diagnoses like cerebral palsy, and half of the children needed more than one technology. Overall, an average of 45 hours of home care help was needed at the first interview, and that need grew by the second interview.

The researcher found mothers whose children no longer used technologies had the greatest improvement in family functioning and normalcy.

Toly said children in the study “are in a high risk, vulnerable group…3 children died in the one year span of time between interviews and one mother died. This is much higher than the general population.”

But for those who continue to require technology, integrating the child into family events is critical. Toly has seen mothers pack up the technology and take the child along with other siblings to soccer practice and other family events. In another instance, one mother missed an annual family camping trip because of the extra work required to include the technology-dependent child in the trip; the following year, the extended family pitched in and built ramps, making it possible for the mother and child to join in the camping fun.

Examples like these keep families on the normal track. “Mothers integrate technology-dependent child into the family by being flexible about when to give medications or food,” Toly said.

But, adhering to rigid schedules can interfere with what others in the family need to do, and it can create problems, Toly added.

“A mother’s depression plays a greater role in family functioning than the child’s severity of illness,” Toly reported.

As early as the 1980s, Toly saw technological advances were keeping preemies alive, but “we didn’t know what the long-term impact that technology would have on the families and the children.”

She said that even 30 years later, the effect is unknown. She has set out to understand what families encounter and help the families have a normal life even among the tubes, monitors and medications.

Carol Musil from the Case Western Reserve University nursing school and John C. Carl from the Cleveland Clinic contributed to the study. View the article at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nur.21454/abstract.

“What kids find visually appealing is very different than what appeals to their parents,” said Brian Wansink, professor of Marketing in Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. “Our study shows how to make the changes so the broccoli and fish look tastier than they otherwise would to little Casey or little Audrey.”

The study is published in the January issue of Acta Paediatrica (101:1).

Wansink and co-authors Kevin Kniffin and Mitsuru Shimizu, Cornell postdoctoral research associates; and Francesca Zampollo of London Metropolitan University, presented 23 preteen children and 46 adults with full-size photos of 48 different combinations of food on plates that varied by number of items, placement of entrée and organization of the food.

“Compared with adults, children not only prefer plates with more elements and colors, but also their entrees placed in the front of the plate and with figurative designs,” Kniffin said. “While much of the research concerning food preferences among children and adults focuses on ‘taste, smell and chemical’ aspects, we will build on findings that demonstrate that people appear to be significantly influenced by the shape, size and visual appearance of food that is presented to them.”

Researchers analyzed national data detailing relationship characteristics between mothers and their children during their toddler years. The lower the quality of the relationship in terms of the child’s emotional security and the mother’s sensitivity, the higher the risk that a child would be obese at age 15 years, according to the analysis.

Among those toddlers who had the lowest-quality emotional relationships with their mothers, more than a quarter were obese as teens, compared to 13 percent of adolescents who had closer bonds with their mothers in their younger years.

The findings mirror previous research by these scientists that showed toddlers who did not have a secure emotional relationship with their parents were at increased risk for obesity by age 4 ½. This body of work suggests the areas of the brain that control emotions and stress responses, as well as appetite and energy balance, could be working together to influence the likelihood that a child will be obese.

Rather than blaming parents for childhood obesity, the researchers say these findings suggest that obesity prevention efforts should consider strategies to improve the mother-child bond and not focus exclusively on eating and exercise.

“It is possible that childhood obesity could be influenced by interventions that try to improve the emotional bonds between mothers and children rather than focusing only on children’s food intake and activity,” said Sarah Anderson, assistant professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University and lead author of the study.

“The sensitivity a mother displays in interacting with her child may be influenced by factors she can’t necessarily control. Societally, we need to think about how we can support better-quality maternal-child relationships because that could have an impact on child health,” she said.

The study appears online and is scheduled for publication in the January 2012 issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers analyzed data from 977 participants in the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a project of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The sample in this national study included diverse families living in nine U.S. states whose children were born in 1991.

As part of that national study, trained observers assessed child attachment security and maternal sensitivity by documenting interactions between mothers and their children at three time points: when the children were 15, 24 and 36 months old.

In the maternal sensitivity assessment, mothers were instructed to play with their child while investigators rated several aspects of each mother’s behavior, including supportiveness and respect for autonomy as well as signs of intrusiveness or hostility. Investigators rated attachment security of the children at age 15 and 36 months by monitoring a child’s separation from and reunion with the mother. At 24 months, researchers assessed children’s attachment security by observing mothers and children in their home.

Maternal sensitivity refers to a mother’s ability to recognize her child’s emotional state and respond with comfort, consistency and warmth. Psychologists describe securely attached children as those who rely on their parents as a “safe haven,” which allows them to explore their environments freely, adapt easily to new people and be comforted in stressful situations. Toddlers who are insecurely attached tend to have experienced negative or unpredictable parenting, and may respond to stress with extreme anger, fear or anxiety, or avoid or refuse interactions with others.

Using these assessments of maternal sensitivity and child attachment security, Anderson and colleagues developed a maternal-child relationship quality score for their own statistical analysis. With a range of zero to six, the score served as an aggregate measure of a child’s early relationship experience: Each point reflected a child’s display of insecure attachment or a mother’s ranking in the lowest quartile of sensitivity at one of the three assessment time points. The researchers designated a score equal to or greater than three as indicating a poor-quality emotional relationship.

The researchers calculated the body mass index (BMI) of the children using their heights and weights measured at or near age 15 years. BMIs were converted into percentiles for age and sex based on growth charts developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In accordance with current guidelines, children were considered obese if their BMI scores were at or above the 95th percentile on those charts.

A total of 241 children, or 24.7 percent, were classified as having a poor quality maternal-child relationship during early childhood based on a score of three or higher. The prevalence of obesity in adolescence was 26.1 percent among these children with the poorest early maternal-child relationships. The teen obesity prevalence was lower for children with better maternal relationships: 15.5 percent, 12.1 percent and 13 percent among those who had scores of two, one and zero, respectively.

Accounting for children’s gender and birth weight – two of several sociodemographic factors that also can influence the quality of the maternal-child relationship and risk for obesity – children with the poorest quality early maternal-child relationship were almost 2 ½ times as likely to be obese as adolescents than were children who had the best relationships with their mothers.

Anderson and colleagues suggest that this association between early childhood experiences and teen obesity has origins in the brain. The limbic system in the brain controls responses to stress as well as the sleep/wake cycle, hunger and thirst, and a variety of metabolic processes, mostly through the regulation of hormones.

“Sensitive parenting increases the likelihood that a child will have a secure pattern of attachment and develop a healthy response to stress,” Anderson said. “A well-regulated stress response could in turn influence how well children sleep and whether they eat in response to emotional distress – just two factors that affect the likelihood for obesity.”

Obesity may be one manifestation of dysregulation in the functioning of the stress response system. Parents help children develop a healthy response to stress by protecting children from extreme levels of stress, responding supportively and consistently to normal levels of stress, and modeling behavioral responses to stress.

“The evidence here is supportive of the association between a poor-quality maternal-child relationship and an increased chance for adolescent obesity,” Anderson said. “Interventions are effective in increasing maternal sensitivity and enhancing young children’s ability to regulate their emotions, but the effect of these interventions on children’s obesity risk is not known, and we think it would be worth investigating.”

That’s what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new longitudinal study published in the journal Child Development.

“Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else’s shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely that their children will be able to do the same,” according to Brad Farrant, postdoctoral fellow at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia, the study’s lead author.

To learn more about how we develop the ability to take another’s perspective, researchers looked at the influence of the way parents interact with and talk to their children. The two-year study involved more than 120 Australian children between the ages of 4 and 6 at the start of the study, both youngsters with typically developing language and those who were delayed in their acquisition of language. The participants were part of a larger ongoing longitudinal research project.

The children completed tasks designed to assess their language skills, their ability to infer others’ beliefs and use these to predict others’ behavior, and their ability to flexibly shift between different perspectives. Mothers also reported on the types of language they used with their children.

Among children with typically developing language, the researchers found that moms who talked more often and in greater detail about people’s thoughts and feelings—commenting on how another person might react to a particular situation as well as their own feelings about the topic at hand—had children with better language skills and better perspective-taking skills. This suggests that mothers’ use of this type of language influences their children’s language ability and cognitive flexibility, which in turn appears to influence their development of theory of mind, a key component in learning to take another’s perspective.

Children with delayed language acquisition were delayed in their development of perspective-taking skills—though this wasn’t necessarily due to moms’ use of language. This highlights the role played by language as children develop the ability to take another’s perspective.

“Solving the many challenges that the world faces today requires us all to get better at taking the perspective of other people,” according to Farrant.