From the NYT (via free subscription):
And there are other ways that being a dedicated parent strengthens our minds. Research shows that learning and memory skills can be improved by bearing and nurturing offspring. A team of neuroscientists in Virginia found that mother lab rats, just like working mothers, demonstrably excel at time-management and efficiency, racing around mazes to find rewards and get back to the pups in record time. Other research is showing how hormones elevated in parenting can help buffer mothers from anxiety and stress – a timely gift from a sometimes compassionate Mother Nature.
Of course, they put in the mandatory swipe at IQ/intelligence, assuming there is this orthogonal entity called emotional intelligence that can add oodles above-and-beyond g in predicting job/educational/life outcomes, but skip over that part and you get to the crux of the article’s idea: Perhaps then we can start to re-imagine a mother’s brain as less a handicap than a keen asset in the lifelong task of getting smart, i.e., the non-recursive mother-child relation. Mothers influence their children’s intellectual development (well, prenatally and in the first 5 or so years, anyway), but the kid’s repay the favor by influencing her own cognitive development.
In other words, we’re getting back to Bell and Harper’s 20+ year old work. Happy mom’s day, indeed.
Posted by A. Beaujean at 03:05 PM