Parenthood may help the brain stay young

Raising children may help your brain stay young.

A study of almost 38,000 adults finds that the more kids they had, the more synchronized the activity between certain brain regions became. The strongest association between the number of children and functional connectivity turned up in a brain network believed to aid in inferring others’ thoughts, researchers report in the March 4 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Coordinated activity within this network typically decreases with age, suggesting that child-rearing — which involves learning new skills — may provide long-lasting protection against brain aging.

“It’s very similar for males and females, so it’s not that pregnancy effect; it’s really a parenting effect,” says cognitive neuroscientist Edwina Orchard of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Past brain-imaging research on parents often focused on how pregnancy changes the brain. But limiting child-rearing research to biological phenomena can overlook the environmental influences experienced by parents of all sexes.

While at Yale University, Orchard and her colleagues examined functional MRI scans of nearly 20,000 female and 18,000 male individuals who were middle-aged and older, using data from the U.K. Biobank database. As the number of kids parented went up, people of both sexes showed greater functional connectivity in the somatomotor network compared to those with fewer or no children. This network helps individuals interpret other people’s behaviors and figure out their wants and needs — an important part of caregiving, Orchard says.

Parenthood may shift brain region coordination in the opposite direction of age-related decline by providing a complex and novel environment that lasts for decades, Orchard says. But raising kids is just one way to introduce complexity and novelty, she notes. Complicated jobs, higher education and learning a foreign language can also enrich the brain.

The new study, however, cannot establish that raising kids caused the observed differences in brain activity. Other factors that influence the number of children, such as virility and societal norms surrounding parenthood, may also play a role.

Still, the results help flip the narrative about parenthood’s effect on the brain. “There’s a social rhetoric about parenthood being bad for the brain — this idea of ‘baby brain’ or ‘mommy brain,’” Orchard says. But “the cognitive challenges related to early parenthood, sustained across the life span, might actually be resulting in a brain that is more resilient.”