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New research suggests that a mother’s state of mindfulness during challenging moments with her infant is linked to specific patterns of brain activity that may help buffer against parenting stress. The preliminary findings, published in Mindfulness, indicate that when mothers observe their negative emotions without becoming absorbed by them, they engage brain regions involved in self-reflection and emotional regulation.
Parenting an infant involves navigating frequent cycles of distress and soothing, which can take an emotional toll. To manage these demands, experts suggest that mindfulness might be an internal resource that helps caregivers remain attentive and emotionally balanced. Much of the past research into this concept has focused on trait mindfulness, which is a person’s general, stable tendency to stay focused on the present moment. However, less is known about state mindfulness. State mindfulness is the fleeting, moment-to-moment experience of tuning into the present with an attitude of openness and curiosity.
“I grew up in a family where I was fortunate to have a strong relationship with my parents and where contemplative practices, including practices related to mindfulness, were part of our everyday life,” said lead author Vani Gupta, a doctoral candidate in Human Development and Family Studies and Social Data Analytics at Pennsylvania State University. “Those experiences shaped my interest in understanding parent-child relationships and how mindfulness might support the ways parents relate and respond to their children.”
When a baby cries or shows distress, it naturally triggers a strong biological reaction in a caregiver. A 2016 review outlined how infant sensory cues quickly activate specialized brain networks in parents that support empathy and instinctual caregiving.
At the same time, managing those intense responses requires cognitive control. A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 demonstrated that new mothers with higher stress hormone levels tended to show altered brain activity when listening to their babies cry, which was linked to more intrusive parenting behaviors. To better understand how healthy emotional regulation works in real-time, the authors of the current study explored how state mindfulness alters the brain’s response to an infant’s emotional expressions.
“There is growing evidence that mindfulness can support parents and the parent-child relationship, but we know much less about what a mindful response actually looks like in the moment—particularly when a parent is responding to their child’s distress,” Gupta explained. “This study gave us an opportunity to open up that ‘black box’ by looking at whether mothers’ moment-to-moment experiences of mindfulness were reflected in how their brains responded to their own infants during emotionally challenging situations.”
Gupta and co-author Heidemarie Laurent recruited 24 mothers of three-month-old infants from agencies supporting low-income families in the Pacific Northwest. Before the brain scanning sessions, researchers visited the mothers’ homes to record videos of them interacting with their infants. They recorded two scenarios: a playful game of peekaboo designed to elicit positive emotions, and a brief arm-restraint task designed to elicit mild frustration or negative emotions from the baby.
Later, the mothers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which tracks blood flow in the brain to measure neural activity. While inside the scanner, the mothers watched short clips of their own infant’s face from the previously recorded positive and negative situations. Immediately after exiting the scanner, the mothers completed the Toronto Mindfulness Scale, rating how much decentering and curiosity they experienced specifically while watching the videos of their infant in distress. They also filled out questionnaires assessing their general levels of parenting stress and their overall mindful parenting habits.
The researchers observed distinct patterns of brain activity tied to the two components of state mindfulness. Mothers who reported higher levels of decentering during the negative videos showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex. This brain area is heavily involved in self-reflective awareness, understanding the mental states of oneself and others, and regulating emotions. Higher decentering was also associated with increased activation in the superior frontal gyrus and the precuneus, regions that support perspective-taking and emotional introspection.
The curiosity component of state mindfulness was linked to a more localized brain response. Mothers who reported higher curiosity showed increased activity in the frontal pole, a region located at the very front of the brain that is associated with openness to new experiences and cognitive flexibility.
“What stood out to us was the stronger role of decentering compared with curiosity, another aspect of state mindfulness we examined,” Gupta told PsyPost. “Decentering was associated with a broader pattern of neural activity, and activity associated with decentering also predicted lower parenting stress. This suggests that the capacity to step back from one’s immediate thoughts and emotions may be particularly relevant when parents are processing their infant’s distress.”
Specifically, the researchers found that higher activation in the medial prefrontal cortex during the infant distress videos accounted for about 22 percent of the variance in stress scores. However, momentary, state-level brain responses did not neatly map onto broad, trait-level mindful parenting habits measured by the general survey.
“For parents, I think the broader takeaway is that mindfulness may not necessarily mean feeling calm or avoiding difficult emotions; it may involve being able to experience those emotions with a little more space and perspective,” Gupta said.
Because the study used a cross-sectional design and a modest sample size, it provides a snapshot in time rather than definitive proof of cause and effect. “This was a small, preliminary study, so the findings should be viewed as an initial step rather than definitive evidence about how mindfulness operates in parenting,” Gupta cautioned. “Because we observed mothers’ naturally occurring experiences rather than experimentally changing their mindfulness, we cannot conclude that mindfulness caused the differences we saw in neural responses or parenting stress.”
“Our participants were also mothers of young infants, many from lower-income households, so it will be important to see whether these patterns replicate in larger and more diverse samples and across different stages of parenting,” Gupta added.
“Because this was a preliminary study, an important next step would be to develop a more nuanced understanding of how mindfulness unfolds in real time during parenting,” Gupta explained. “In this study, we asked mothers to report on their experience of mindfulness after they had watched the videos of their infants in the fMRI scanner. Future studies could get even closer to the experience by asking parents about their mindfulness as they are watching and responding to the videos, and pairing those real-time reports with their neural responses, observations of their behavior, or physiological responses.”
Exploring whether actual mindfulness interventions lead to observable changes in these specific brain regions over time is another important next step. “A first step would be to test whether mindfulness training actually changes parents’ moment-to-moment mindfulness during interactions with their children,” Gupta said.
“If it does, longer-term studies could then examine whether repeated changes in mindful responding gradually build into more enduring patterns of mindful parenting and, ultimately, better parenting outcomes. Observing parent-child interactions alongside these measures could also help determine whether these changes translate into how parents actually respond to their children in everyday life.”
“One thing we hope the study highlights is that ‘mindful parenting’ is not simply a trait that someone either has or does not have,” Gupta concluded. “There may be meaningful moment-to-moment processes—such as being able to notice a difficult emotional response without becoming completely absorbed in it—that shape how parents experience and respond to challenging interactions with their children. Understanding those processes more precisely may help us think about mindfulness as a capacity that can potentially be cultivated rather than an ideal that parents are expected to meet.”
The study, “What Is a Mindful Parenting Response? A Preliminary Study Connecting Mothers’ State Mindfulness to Their Neural Response to Infant and Parenting Outcomes,” was authored by Vani Gupta and Heidemarie Laurent.