Parenthood could be a protective factor against aging and cognitive decline, Rutgers study shows

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People may think about all the stress and anxiety that comes with parenting. But new research shows that parents’ brains may actually get an unexpected benefit from raising children.

A study by experts at Rutgers and Yale universities found that parenthood is associated with stronger brain functions and connectivity that can serve as protective factors against some effects of aging.

Specifically, researchers found that parents with more children had stronger connectivity in brain networks involving movement and sensation, which typically decline as a person ages. This was true for both mothers and fathers, indicating that environment rather than biological experiences like pregnancy and childbirth is driving the positive cognitive effects.

“Parenthood is perhaps one of the most salient and important life events for many individuals,” said Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and faculty member of the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. “It has a massive change in the environment that you find yourself embedded in once children enter into your life, so it’s a perfect window to study the extent to which environment can affect brain functioning.”

The study was published in the Feb. 25 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Researchers analyzed health information and brain scans from nearly 37,000 adults in the United Kingdom who participated in the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database.

They looked at brain images from MRI scans and family and health information from adults with one child, multiple children and no children.

Experts noted that the cognitive benefits for parents seemed to be cumulative — meaning the more children each adult had, the stronger the brain differences.

“It does look sort of like a dose response model that you’d find in a typical medical study,” Holmes said, “where you increase the dosage, you find a larger effect.”

The protective brain factors against cognitive decline don’t come from the number of children themselves, Holmes said, but rather the social connections and environmental changes associated with raising kids.

“They drag you out of your comfort zone,” he said. “They draw you into new experiences, they put you into new social situations. You’re exposed not just to your own children and their friends, but the families of their friends, and you build this whole rich social environment that your kids help you construct.”

The study’s findings could also suggest that there may be cognitive benefits for other people involved in raising children, like grandparents and childcare workers, Holmes said.

He added that adults without children may also develop similar protective factors against cognitive decline and aging that come from other experiences and social connections unrelated to parenting.

Researchers noted that the study focused on specific populations in the United Kingdom. While there are several demographic and lifestyle parallels to populations in the United States, Holmes said more research is needed to determine if the study results apply across more cultures and regions around the world.

But Holmes said this study is a good first step for further exploration.

“We spend a lot of time saying our kids should thank us for the amount of effort we put into raising them,” he said. “Maybe we should thank our children for the positives that they bring into our lives.”