Mum's love can boost kid's brain development

School-age children who get plenty of nurturing from their mothers early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress, a new study has found.

The research by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is the first to show that changes in this critical region of children's brain anatomy are linked to a mother's nurturing.

"This study validates something that seems to be intuitive, which is just how important nurturing parents are to creating adaptive human beings," said first author Joan L Luby, MD. "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 big impact on later development," she  said.