Think having kids drains your brain? Think again.
A new study suggests that those sleepless nights and stressful mornings might actually be keeping your mind young and sharp.
Researchers analyzed the brain scans of 19,964 women and 17,607 men from the UK and found that people who had children showed slower cognitive decline as they aged compared to those with fewer or no kids.
“The regions that decrease in functional connectivity as individuals age are the regions associated with increased connectivity when individuals have had children,” said lead study author Avram Holmes, a psychiatry professor at the Rutgers Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research.
That the results were the same for men and women indicates that these brain-boosting effects are due to parenting as opposed to pregnancy.
“The caregiving environment, rather than pregnancy alone, appears important since we see these effects in both mothers and fathers,” Holmes said.
And it seems like the more children you have, the better the effects.
“We’re seeing a widespread pattern of functional alterations, where a higher number of children parented is associated with increased functional connectivity,” especially in parts of the brain related to movement, sensation and social connection, Holmes said.
The findings fly in the face of the customary belief that raising kids not only makes you want to tear your hair out but also breaks your brain.
In fact, the researchers believe that the expanded friends network and frequent family visits that come with parenting create social bonds that also benefit cognitive function.
It’s also likely that having kids might make you more physically active, have healthier habits and engage in more mental gymnastics — all of which can also delay brain aging.
The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.
The researchers cautioned that since the study’s participants were all from the UK, the findings might not necessarily apply to the general population.
They also emphasized that more studies are needed to determine precisely how parenting can help fight brain aging.
Expanded research could have implications on how to combat loneliness and dementia in an aging population, especially since fewer people are having kids these days.
In 2020, people in their 60s outnumbered children under 10 in the US.
“If what we’re picking up is a relationship between enhanced social interactions and social support that comes about through having increased numbers of children in your life, then that means that we could tap into those same processes even if individuals don’t have a social support network currently,” Holmes said.
