Positive parenting predicts the development of adolescent neural reward circuitry: A longitudinal study

Parenting and Offspring Brain Development: What Do We Know?

“…Given that most children will not experience maltreatment (Wildeman et al, 2014) Dégeilh et al, 2018, Jiang et al, 2020Kok et al, 2015;Lee, Siegle, Dahl, Hooley, & Silk, 2014, Guyer et al, 2015Kopala-Sibley et al, 2020Wang et al, 2019, Brody et al, 2019, Schneider et al, 2012, Romund et al, 2016, Thijssen et al, 2017Whittle et al, 2008Whittle et al, , 2009Whittle et al, , 2014Whittle et al, , 2016Whittle et al, , 2017Yap et al, 2008). Five were cross-sectional and seven were longitudinal An important exception comes from a series of studies from Whittle and colleagues (Whittle et al, 2013(Whittle et al, , 2016. In these studies, adolescents completed structural MRI scans at (Beckwith et al, 1992, Eshel et al, 2006, Landry et al, 2008.…”

“…Positive parenting is additionally important to consider given that positive and negative parenting do not lie on a spectrum; rather, they are at least somewhat orthogonal (Whittle et al, 2014). For example, a lack of negative parenting (e.g., harshness, criticism, control) does not necessarily imply high (Whittle et al, 2013; found that, even controlling for negative or aggressive parenting, positive maternal parenting as assessed during the problemsolving interaction task predicted change in adolescent amygdala volume and prefrontal cortical thickness (Whittle et al, 2013). They also found that positive parenting buffers the effects of lower socioeconomic status on amygdala and prefrontal cortex development (Whittle et al, 2017).…”

“…Other work has similarly found links between maternal support, care, responsiveness, or positive parenting generally during early childhood and children's hippocampal volumes (Luby et al, 2012), anterior cingulate and thalamus volumes (Rao et al, 2010), global cortical thickness (Frye et al, 2010), orbitofrontal cortex activation in adolescents during an emotion processing task (Pozzi et al, 2020), and strength of structural covariance networks (Richmond et al, 2018). Thus, multiple single time point studies suggest that positive parenting is linked to adolescent brain structure and function in range of regions including but not limited to regions relevant to affect, memory, and emotion processing, while two studies have found that positive parenting in adolescence influences development over time in prefrontal and limbic regions (Whittle et al, 2013(Whittle et al, , 2016. Whittle et al (2016) provide the first evidence to our knowledge that positive parenting may buffer the effects of low socioeconomic status on prefrontal and limbic brain development.…”

“…Similarly, studies have also largely employed selfreports instead of observational measures (e.g., Holmes et al, 2018;Rao et al, 2010), and use self-reports to assess parenting experiences retrospectively (e.g., Teicher et al, 2004;Thomason et al, 2015). Additionally, research has largely focused on the effects of extreme developmental adversity such as institutional rearing, trauma, maltreatment, or neglect (e.g., Walsh et al, 2014;Whittle et al, 2013), as opposed suboptimal but normative parenting.. Where studies have examined normative parenting (e.g., Whittle et al, 2014), these studies have largely focused on maternal rather than paternal influences. Many of these studies also focused on these influences from a range of sources (e.g., childhood adversity or stress in general) as opposed to focusing on parenting per se (e.g., Tottenham et al, 2011;Van der Werff et al, 2013).…”

“…Indeed, of the studies surveyed (Table 1), 48 were cross sectional. Of the 30 longitudinal papers (9 structural MRI and 21 fMRI), only six included assessed parenting and brain structure or function and then conducted MRI scans at a later time point (Whittle et al, 2017;Whittle et al, 2016;Whittle at al., 2013;Tyborowska at al., 2018;Pagliaccio et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2019). Only one of these studies (Wang et al, 2019) ; Kok et al, 2015;Taylor, Eisenberger, Saxbe, Lehman, & Lieberman, 2006;Guyer et al, 2015;Jiang et al, 2020;Kopala-Sibley et al, 2020).…”