When the need for both parents to be working becomes more apparent, it is but common for most parents to focus more on work than their children. Although not everyone is doing that, children these days spend more time with a nanny or a baby-sitter rather than their biological parents.
However, parents must think about their actions more as a recent Chinese study revealed that the brain of children lacking direct parental care develop slower than those children whose parents spend more time with them.
Preliminary findings suggest that children who lack direct care of their biological parents for extended periods have larger gray matter volumes in the emotional circuitry of their brain. According to researchers, direct parental care greatly influences a child's brain development.
The researchers wrote in the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, that since the brain has a larger gray matter volume, it may reflect trimming the brain's maturity, the negative connection between the gray matter and IQ scores suggests that indeed growing children without direct parental supervision or care can slow down the development of the brain.
However, biological parenting does not account for all the differences between groups of children.
Yuan Xiao, a doctoral candidate at Sichuan University told Medical Daily that those children who had been adopted or placed in foster care exhibited a smaller deficit than orphans.
The economic progress in China has inspired hundreds of millions of workers to relocated for months, sometimes it even take them years staying in cities far from their children just to get better jobs. This dramatic migration has resulted in millions of so-called, "left behind children." Although their relatives take care of them, they still lack spending time with their biological parents. So how does this situation affect the brain?
To further test this situation, Dr. Su Lui, senior investigator and a professor at Sichuan University, and his colleagues examined 38 LBC volunteers who had lived without biological parents for more than 6 months. The children, 21 boys, were aged between 7 and 13, with an average age of 9.6. The researchers also listed 30 comparison children, 19 boys between ages 7 and 14 and all living with their parents to help with the investigation.
Each child was tested to determine their IQ, and then the team scanned their brains using MRI to look at the gray matter and compared the data among the groups.
The researchers revealed that the brain of the left-behind children showed larger gray matter volumes in several brain regions, especially in the emotional brain circuitry than those children who are living with their parents. In general, the IQ scores of the left behind children was not very different from those other children, but the gray matter volume in a brain area related to memory and encoding and retrieval was negatively related to IQ score.
