Distracted parenting lead to troubled kids
Attention, parents! A new study by the University of California, Irvine shows that distracted parenting can disrupt your child’s brain development and lead to emotional problems later in life.
The studies were done on mice, but results show that distracted parenting can have a long term impact. It turns out that the brain’s dopamine receptor pleasure circuits in newborns and infants are stimulated by predictable sequences of events. If infants are not sufficiently exposed to such reliable patterns, their pleasure systems do not mature properly.
As a result, kids will grow up with anhedonia, or the inability to feel happy. Anhedonia pushes kids into depression or seeking more extreme forms of stimulation like reckless driving, drinking, or drugs.
“It is known that vulnerability to emotional disorders, such as depression, derives from interactions between our genes and the environment, especially during sensitive developmental periods,” said Baram, the Danette “Dee Dee” Shepard Chair in Neurological Studies.
“Our work builds on many studies showing that maternal care is important for future emotional health. Importantly, it shows that it is not how much maternal care that influences adolescent behavior but the avoidance of fragmented and unpredictable care that is crucial. We might wish to turn off the mobile phone when caring for baby and be predictable and consistent.”
The study’s results appear in Translational Psychiatry.
