Positive Parenting Gets “Under the Skin”
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Adolescence is when values and relationships are formed and things happen that leave their sticky fingerprints on the life that follows. Even, it seems, in the everyday functioning of brain systems. New research published in Developmental Science shows that when teenagers have a positive relationship with their parents, then as adults their brains and bodies respond to stress in a way that helps them better engage with the world. However, the study suggests this benefit may be denied to those raised in a rough environment, which seems to override the influence of positive parenting.
The researchers, led by Elizabeth Shirtcliff of Iowa State University, studied hundreds of people from Seattle, USA, who, when they were teenagers, had described their relations with their parents through questions like “are you close to your mother?” Trained raters also scored how much encouragement and appropriate reward they received from their parents, based on videos taken of the teens and their parents completing various structured tasks.
Some five years later, 280 of the then-teens, now aged between 19 and 22 years, provided saliva samples to Shirtcliff’s team to gauge their cortisol levels. Cortisol is a key indicator of HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) activity, which governs our sensitivity to new information and stressors. After controlling for variables such as gender, family income, and sleep habits, the researchers wanted to see how cortisol was related to the measures of teen-parent relations.
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