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3-211 - How Does Parenting Become Biologically Embedded? Integrating Insights from Neuroimaging, Immunology, and Electrophysiology

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 321

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Nurturant parenting promotes child wellbeing and protects against poor mental and physical health, concurrently and across the lifespan. This international and interdisciplinary symposium strives to delineate some of the pathways through which nurturant parenting confers these enduring benefits. These papers from four research groups capture diverse parenting dimensions (parental sensitivity, divorce, harsh parenting, family conflict, parental warmth) and varied outcomes (brain morphology, diurnal cortisol, inflammation, depressive symptomatology, cardiovascular health), but consistently link higher-quality parenting to better outcomes, and try to understand the neurobiological underpinnings of such associations.
Paper 1 presents findings from a population-based study examining an aggregated general parenting factor and specific parenting components as predictors of brain morphology at age 10, including gray matter volumetric measures and white matter microstructure.
Paper 2 uses an accelerated longitudinal design to characterize trajectories of diurnal cortisol and subcortical brain development from early childhood to late adolescence following early deprivation of parental care versus typical parental care.
Paper 3 is based on a longitudinal study of Mexican-origin adolescents and reports that conflicts with parents between the ages of 10-16 predict depression and elevated immunological markers of low-grade inflammation in young adulthood, particularly for youth exposed to poverty.
Paper 4 provides evidence from the national MIDUS study (N=1,105) that middle-aged adults who experienced greater childhood parental warmth exhibit greater heart rate variability and better cardiovascular health after midlife.
These papers reveal several pathways through which parenting might shape the development of the central nervous system and peripheral physiology, suggesting multiple targets for intervention.

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