Scientists found that how warmly mothers played with their 3-year-olds was linked to a brain signal tied to depression risk, all the way to age 18
In 2004, researchers in New York invited hundreds of mothers and their 3-year-olds into a lab to read books and build with blocks while a camera rolled. Coders scored every session for warmth, encouragement and support, and for harshness and intrusiveness. Then the team kept coming back. Over the next 15 years they recorded the brain activity of 465 of those children at ages 9, 12, 15 and 18, focusing on one signal that earlier research has tied to depression. The question was whether a few lab games at age 3 could say anything about how positive parenting shows up in a teenager’s brain.
The brain signal they measured
At each visit, the children played a simple guessing game while wearing an EEG cap. They picked one of two doors on a screen. Behind one they won 50 cents, behind the other they lost 25 cents. When people win, the brain produces a burst of electrical activity about a quarter of a second later, known as the reward positivity. A stronger burst means the brain is responding more to good outcomes.
This signal matters because a weak response has been linked to later depression. In the overall group, it followed a familiar arc: it grew from age 9 to about 15, then started to fade as the teenagers approached adulthood.
What positive parenting was linked to
Children whose mothers showed more positive parenting at age 3, meaning more warmth, support, confidence and clear instruction during the tasks, had a higher average reward response across all four visits. Their response also climbed more steeply through early adolescence.
The opposite held for negative parenting. Children whose mothers were more hostile or intrusive during the age 3 sessions showed a flatter rise in reward response over the years. Stressful life events in the first three years, such as hospital stays, accidents or the death of a parent, were not linked to the signal in this sample.
The analysis accounted for child sex and for whether the mother had ever had major depression, which applied to about 30% of the mothers. That matters, because a depressed parent can pass on genetic risk as well as parenting habits.
“In this project, we demonstrate that early parenting is associated with one of the largest neural indicators of risk for mental health concerns we know of to date,” lead author Kaylin Hill of the University of Notre Dame said in a statement.
What earlier studies found
The link between this brain signal and depression comes largely from the same research network. In 2016, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that adolescent girls with a blunted reward response were more likely to develop depression over the following 18 months, even if they had no symptoms at the start.
Earlier work in this very cohort had found that low positive parenting at age 3 predicted a weaker reward response at age 9. The new paper extends that to the full stretch from childhood to the edge of adulthood. Depression in children remains hard to treat, as we reported this week when a re-analysis showed how one flawed trial inflated the evidence for Prozac in kids, which is part of why researchers are looking for earlier warning signs.
What the study cannot show
This is an observational study, and the authors stress that it shows an association, not that parenting directly shapes the brain signal. Parents and children share genes, and a child’s own temperament can draw out warmer or harsher responses from a parent.
Parenting was observed only once, during about six structured lab tasks with mothers, so it captures a snapshot rather than years of daily life. When positive and negative parenting were tested in the same model, neither stood out on its own, which suggests both reflect a broader quality of parenting. The results also depended on how the brain signal was scored. With a stricter scoring method that subtracts the response to losing from the response to winning, the parenting links disappeared.
The sample was mostly white, middle-class families from one area of New York, and the study was not preregistered. It also did not test whether these children went on to develop depression. The authors see the findings as support for programs that help parents early, but they did not test any such program.
The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Source
Hill KE, Bean CAL, Abitante G, et al. “Early parenting is associated with the development of neural reward responsiveness from childhood through adolescence.” Communications Psychology, 2026.
DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00507-7
Also cited
Nelson BD, Perlman G, Klein DN, Kotov R, Hajcak G. “Blunted neural response to rewards as a prospective predictor of the development of depression in adolescent girls.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 2016.
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.15121524
