Love makes the world go around, they say.
And not only that, according to a new study, it's the single most important variable in the successful development of well-being in our children.
That's right. The more you show you love your children, hug them, kiss them, play with them and speak encouraging and kind words to them, the bigger their
brains grow.
It seems our brains, according to research, are indeed wired for love. From an evolutionary perspective, as the fittest of species, the brain’s ability to grow in response to love can be seen as a way to keep humans banded together against danger and intruders.
What the study of 92 preschoolers showed, was that a mother's nurturing love for her child fosters the growth of the hippocampus, a region of the child's brain that is key to learning and responding to stress, researchers found.
What more, the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that some of the children whose mothers were very loving had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than their peers whose mothers who didn't show as much care.
"I think the public health implications suggest that we should pay more attention to parents' nurturing, and we should do what we can as a society to foster these skills because clearly nurturing has a very, very big impact on later development," study author Dr. Joan Luby of Washington University's medical school in St. Louis explained.
The children and their parents who took pat in the US study were assessed four to six times over the course of the project, and when the children reached ages seven to 13, they had the MRIs to measure their brains.
And what the researchers found was that maternal support was "strongly predictive" of the size of the hippocampus at school age.
