Positive Parenting Shapes the Adolescent Brain’s Response to Joy, 15-Year Study Finds

One of the most enduring convictions in developmental psychology is that the way parents raise their children in the earliest years leaves a lasting imprint on mental health. A new study from the University of Notre Dame now offers some of the strongest evidence yet that this imprint may be visible in the brain itself. According to research published in Communications Psychology, a journal in the Nature portfolio, the parenting behaviors children experience at age three coincide with how strongly their brains respond to rewards across adolescence, a developmental window in which vulnerability to depression and other mental health disorders reaches its peak. The findings suggest that warmth, praise, and encouragement in early childhood may literally teach the developing brain how to experience joy, while harshness and intrusion may blunt that capacity in ways that persist for years.

The research was led by Kaylin Hill, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology and a clinical psychologist who directs the university’s Psychophysiology of Affect across the Lifespan, or PAL, Lab. Hill is also a faculty affiliate of the Shaw Center for Children and Families and the Eck Institute for Global Health, and much of her career has been devoted to a single deceptively simple question: what makes some people vulnerable to depression while others remain resilient? Her team’s latest work addresses that question by connecting two threads that had rarely been woven together in a single longitudinal design, namely observed parenting behavior in toddlerhood and the long-term development of neural reward responsiveness.

The stakes of the question are considerable. Data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness indicate that more than one in five adults in the United States experiences mental illness in any given year, and that more than one in seven young people between the ages of six and seventeen lives with a mental health disorder. The timing of onset is striking: half of all lifetime mental illness begins by age fourteen, and three quarters by age twenty-four. Any factor that can be identified early, and potentially modified, therefore carries enormous public health significance. Parenting behavior, unlike genetic inheritance, is something that can in principle be changed, which is precisely why Hill and her colleagues consider the new findings so promising.

To trace the connection between early experience and later brain function, the researchers relied on a longitudinal study spanning fifteen years and involving 465 young people and their parents, carried out at Stony Brook University in New York and supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. When the children were three years old, trained observers watched one-on-one interactions between each child and parent in a laboratory setting and systematically coded what they saw. Positive parenting behaviors included displays of warmth, support, and encouragement, while negative parenting behaviors included harshness, heavy-handedness, and excessive intrusiveness. These coded observations then became the baseline against which each child’s later brain development was measured.

The measurement tool was the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a noninvasive technique in which small electrodes attached to the scalp through a cap record the brain’s electrical activity with millisecond-level precision. Beginning at age nine, and again at ages twelve, fifteen, and eighteen, each participant completed a reward task while EEG data were collected. The task was a guessing game in which winning was rewarded with money, allowing the researchers to compare the brain’s electrical signals immediately after a win with those after a loss. The difference between those two signals provides an index of reward responsiveness, one of the largest neural indicators of risk for mental health concerns currently known, as Hill describes it. Because the EEG paradigm is adaptable across a wide range of abilities and cognitive stages, the same measure could be tracked repeatedly across the entire arc of adolescence.

Reward processing, the brain’s capacity to register and respond to positive stimuli, is not a luxury of experience. Previous research has shown that adequate reward processing is necessary for adolescents and adults to feel joy, excitement, and pleasure, and that the foundations of this capacity are visible even in early childhood. When reward responsiveness is blunted, a condition researchers describe as blunted reward sensitivity, individuals tend to experience less pleasure from everyday positive events, a hallmark feature associated with depression. Hill emphasized that reward processing appears to be one piece of the puzzle of what may put a person at risk for developing mental disorders, and that being able to observe how it develops from ages nine to eighteen is genuinely informative for understanding depression risk.

The results of the fifteen-year follow-up were strikingly consistent. Children whose parents had displayed higher levels of positive parenting at age three showed larger neural reward responses to winning the guessing game across adolescence, in effect getting more excited, at the level of brain electrical activity, about positive outcomes. Children raised with more negative parenting styles showed the opposite pattern, responding with less enthusiasm to the same rewards. In Hill’s summary, the more positive and the less negative the parenting behaviors observed at age three, the larger the brain’s reward response seemed to be for individuals across adolescence. The study is, according to the researchers, the first of its kind to measure which early life experiences are associated with reward processing from childhood through late adolescence and early adulthood.

The interpretation Hill and her team offer is that positive parenting in the early years may function as a kind of instruction manual for the developing brain, teaching it how to respond to good things such as fun activities, friendships, success, and well-being. Praise and affirmation from parents, delivered consistently during the preschool period, appear to help children become better at recognizing the joyful elements of life. Conversely, when a parent is particularly harsh or intrusive, the child’s brain may develop a low reward response, a diminished capacity to experience pleasure and happiness that can subsequently open the door to sadness and despondency. Experiencing positive parenting, Hill noted, seems to help facilitate reward processing, which is important for promoting both physical and mental health.

It is important to note that the study was observational, meaning it documents associations between parenting behavior and brain development rather than proving direct causation. Hill acknowledges this limitation but argues that the design still yields important clues about how experiences and development may unfold over time. Current research indicates that the most reliable and prominent predictor of depression is a family history of the disorder combined with the experience of a stressful life event. What the new findings add is a plausible mechanism, rooted in observable behavior and measurable brain function, by which risk might be transmitted within families, and one that is far more open to modification than genetics.

That openness to intervention is where Hill sees the greatest promise. She argues that support may need to include parents and children together, and that it is critical to support parents, perhaps even before a child is born, as well as children and adolescents, in order to address the full sequence running from parent behaviors observed at age three to child development through age eighteen. Behaviors, she points out, are far more open to intervention than a genetic explanation of what drives risk within families. She and her team hope the work can inform a broader conversation about preventing depression, one of the most prevalent and debilitating mental disorders, by pulling together a single strand, one explanation among likely many, of what puts someone at risk and how that risk might be interrupted before it takes hold.

Subject of Research: The association between early parenting behaviors and the development of neural reward responsiveness in children and adolescents

Article Title: Study finds positive parenting teaches children how to experience joy—and could lead to better mental health

Article References: Study finds positive parenting teaches children how to experience joy—and could lead to better mental health. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: positive parenting, reward processing, adolescence, depression risk, EEG, neural reward responsiveness, child development, mental health, longitudinal study, parent-child interaction, Communications Psychology, early intervention