It is true that at first glance we would rather tend to say the opposite. However, a recent study published in the Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2, 2025 affirms it: having children and raising them can stimulate your brain unexpectedly and protect your spirit from long -term aging, reports a Fast Company article. A little message of hope for all the tired parents who wonder if the researchers would not make fun of them.
Research carried out by the umbrella Rutgers Health and the University of Yale, in the United States, has indeed revealed that parents having a greater number of children developed, as they age, increased functional connectivity in certain regions of the brain, in particular those linked to movement and sensory perception. And that’s precisely the good news. Imagine that these networks tend to see their connectivity decreasing with age, in fact suggesting that parenting plays a protective role against the functional aging of the brain.
The study, which analyzed the data collected from more than 37,000 adults, – in 19,964 women and 17,607 men – had the ambition to establish a correlation between the number of children that a parent has had and the biological age of his brain functions. This is now done.
Do not think anymore, make children
This discovery brings a fresh look at the development of the adult brain throughout life. It also offers a reassuring perspective for women faced with “Mom Brain” syndrome or “Maman’s brain”. A well-known phenomenon which in fact designates the cognitive and emotional changes that certain women feel during pregnancy and postpartum, including partial loss of memory, concentration deficits and increased emotional lability.
We could have expected this study to establish a link only with female parenthood, due to the physiological upheavals inherent in pregnancy. However, it shows that men also benefit from better functional connectivity of the brain, suggesting that these effects are more linked to the exercise of the parental role than to carrying the child.
These conclusions suggest that parenthood could therefore help slow brain aging and thus corroborate preliminary studies having shown that the brain structures of parents, in animals, also seem to deteriorate less quickly. What if the secret of immortality was children? Many children?
