University of North Carolina Study Finds Parenting Can Override Effect of Genes in How Babies Respond to Stress

Parenting can certainly be stressful at times as raising children is no easy task.  While watching your baby happily cooing in his crib you may think to yourself infancy is a stress free time in his life.  For certain babies, however, dealing with stress might not be so easy. You can help though, as a new study found that both genetics and parenting play a role in how an infant responds to stress.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered that although a baby may be predetermined to cope poorly with stress, good parenting can override the gene’s effects. Essentially, it is the combination of both genetics and parenting that are key to the development of how babies’ brains regulate cardiac response to stress.

Examining 142 infants throughout the first year of life, researchers placed the babies in a stressful situation at 3, 6, and 12 months old.  The stressful situation was removing the babies from their mothers; during which time the researchers measured infant heart rates- particularly the vagal tone. Vagal tones are a type of cardiac response that during calm states, act as a brake on the heart. Yet during times of stress, the brake is released and vagal tones drop allowing the body to deal with the stressful situation.

The mothers and children were videotaped interacting for about 10 minutes when the babies were 6 months and the researchers determined the sensitivity level of the mothers.  DNA was also collected from the infants to evaluate the form of dopamine receptor present. Recent studies have found that a certain gene, indicative of a reduced number of dopamine receptors, is correlated with risky behaviors in children and an inability able to learn from their mistakes. In the early stages of the study, the babies with this particular gene did not show a decrease is vagal tone during stress regardless of the mother’s behavior.  By the time the infants in the study reached 12 months of age, the pattern had changed.  Babies with the at-risk gene expressed the typical cardiac response during stress if their mothers were sensitive, yet the babies with the same gene who had insensitive mother did not.

What You Can Do
This study brings the nature versus nurture debate to middle ground, as it provides evidence that how a child behaves when he grows up is indeed a little bit of both.  The study also reiterates the importance of positive parenting not just on child development, but how it can aid in overcoming certain genetic predispositions.  Child development lasts for many years, but more and more evidence is proving that the type of parenting you provide during the first year of life can have positive, lasting effects on your child.

Tags: baby stress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Baby Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.