Grandparents who take care of their grandchildren, also known as kangaroo grandparents, establish a very special relationship with them, and if they are loving they can have a very positive influence on child development. A new study has now discovered, for the first time, how grandmothers’ brains react to seeing their grandchildren, specifically when looking at photos of their young grandchildren, providing a neural snapshot of this key intergenerational link.
The research has been carried out by scientists at Emory University and has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “What really stands out in the data is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” said James Rilling , an Emory anthropology professor and lead author of the study, adding, “This suggests that grandmothers are oriented to feel what their grandchildren feel when they interact with them. If their grandchild smiles, they feel the joy of the child. And if their grandson cries, they feel the child’s pain and anguish.”
The study results also show that when grandmothers viewed images of their adult child, there was more intense activation in an area of the brain associated with cognitive empathy, suggesting that they may be trying to cognitively understand what their adult child is thinking or thinking. feeling and why, but not so much emotionally. Rilling explains this by saying that “it is likely that young children have developed traits to be able to manipulate not only the mother’s brain, but also that of their grandmother”, and that “an adult child does not look so cute, so it is possible that doesn’t elicit the same emotional response.”
The ‘grandmother hypothesis’ in child rearing
Mothers are often helped to raise their offspring, although the people who help raise children vary in different societies and social classes. According to Rilling, “we often assume that fathers are the most important caregivers alongside mothers, but that is not always true”, and “in some cases grandmothers are the main helpers”. Thus, and according to the ‘grandmother hypothesis’, if women live many years after their reproductive capacity ends, it is because they can provide evolutionary benefits to their descendants, such as taking care of grandchildren.
This hypothesis has been supported, among other evidence, by the results of a study of the traditional Hadza people of Tanzania, which show that the search for food by grandmothers improves the nutritional status of their grandchildren. In another study, in which traditional communities were analyzed, it was observed that the presence of grandmothers reduces the intervals between the births of their daughters and increases the number of grandchildren. In more modern societies there is increasing evidence that there is a relationship between the commitment of grandmothers in raising children and better results for children in different aspects, such as education, behavior or health.
When they viewed images of their grandchildren in most grandmothers, there was more activity in areas of the brain involved in emotional empathy and movement
The goal of the new study was to understand the brains of healthy grandmothers and their relationship to the benefits they provide to their families. The researchers selected 50 women who answered questionnaires about their experiences as grandmothers, with data such as the amount of time they spent with their grandchildren, the activities they carried out with the minors and the affection they had for them. In addition, these women underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests to measure their brain function while viewing images of their grandchild, an unknown child, the grandchild’s same-sex parent, and an unknown adult.
The researchers thus verified that when they saw images of their grandchildren in most of the participants there was more activity in areas of the brain that intervene in emotional empathy and movement, compared to what happened when they looked at the other images. In addition, those grandmothers in which these brain regions were activated with greater intensity also reported in the questionnaire that they wanted to participate more in the care of their grandchildren.
Comparing the results of this study with those of a previous one in which parents were analyzed while looking at photos of their children, they found that, on average, the areas of the brain involved in emotional empathy and motivation were activated more strongly in the. “Our results add to the evidence that there appears to be a parental care system,” says Rilling.
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