Over Protective Parents
By Alex Scheman and Amanda Shepherd
Overprotective and controlling parents may mean well, but in the long run could be slowing down their child's brain growth which are linked to mental illnesses. Children with parents who are highly protective or neglectful may be more likely to psychiatric disorders which are also related to defects in part of the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that concerns behavior, learning, judgment and personality. To test this, Kosuke Narita of Gunma University, Japan, scanned the brains of 50 people in their 20s and told them to fill out a questionare concerning their relationship with their parents throughout the first 16 years of their life. The questionare was called the Parental Bonding Instrument and was known internationally to unravel relationships between children and their parents.
Narita and his team discovered that children with overprotective parents had less grey matter in the area surrounding the prefrontal cortex than those who had healthy parent-child relationships. The grey matter is part of your nervous system that is in your brain. An interesting observation was that neglectful fathers, not mothers, stimulated less grey matter. This part of the brain develops during childhood and abnormalities there are common for people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Narita thinks that an over release of stress hormone cortisol, either from neglect or too much attention, and the reduced making of dopamine due to poor parenting causes the grey matter growth to stop.
Stephen Wood, who studies adolescent development at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre in Australia, challenges this. He claims that these children may be born with abnormalbilites and other mental illnesses thus causing a rocky parent to child relationship. This brings up the potencial for a reverse order variable. Wood also points out that the test excluded people with a lower status and economic class, which may be contributing factors of childhood. These observations have opened up possible data flaws in the experiment. Although this test might not have been a success, the experiment opened up the eyes of many people in the parental and scientific community.
Acknowledgements: none
Sources:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18633-mom-and-dad-stop-stifling-me--its-damaging-my-brain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=life
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&client=firefox-a&hs=hhy&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=define%3A+prefrontal+lobe&btnG=Search
http://www.shockmd.com/wp-content/dorsolateral-prefrontal-cortex3.jpg
Over Protective Parents
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Posts
Wow. Interesting and good information to know. I hope after reading this I will never become an over bearing parent in the future.
ReplyDelete"Children with parents who are highly protective or neglectful may be more likely to psychiatric disorders"
ReplyDeleteProtective and neglectful are two opposite things.
I thought this article was excellent. I think it's really interesting that two extremes, neglect and over protectiveness, can both potentially lead to the same mental problems in the frontal cortex.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very strange article. I know a lot of kids with overprotective parents.
ReplyDeleteHmm... This is an interesting experiment. I wonder if anything will be done to keep parents form being overprotective.
ReplyDelete