Be grateful to your mom. Not only did she carry you around for nine months, but now new research suggests that her mothering style may have triggered genes that help determine your parenting style. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Like Mother, Like Daughter
New research reveals that a mother's touch early in life could trigger a child's future mothering skills. Columbia University neurobiologist Frances Champagne says that previous research across species showed that maternal behaviors are passed down from mother to daughter.
"So if your mother held you a lot, you will hold your infants a lot," Champagne says.
But she wanted to know whether mothering tendencies are passed on through genetics or experience. Her team studied mother rats that spent time licking and grooming their babies, and others that didn't.
Chemical tags can attach to DNA and act like "stop signs" to turn genes off.
As she wrote in the journal Endocrinology, without enough licking and grooming, female rats had certain genes turn off, also known as methylation.
When a gene is methylated, chemical tags called methyl groups attach to the DNA, preventing the production of certain hormones key to future mothering behaviors, including estrogen and oxytocin, also known as the love hormone.
Licked rats had less of these methyl groups attach to the genes, allowing the production of those hormones. These hormones, in turn, affect behavior when these baby rats become mothers themselves.
Champagne says that through these epigenetic changes, genes and environment interact to pass maternal behaviors from generation to generation.
When Champagne switched the babies, giving the offspring of one type of mother to the other type, she found that the baby rats took after their foster mothers. This suggests that, "It's not who you're born to," says Champagne. "It's what she was like towards you that will alter your behavior and gene expression."
Champagne notes that maternal behavior is complex and that a mother's touch is just one part of a larger puzzle. But she says that these results highlight the need for bonding early in life.
"Mothers are incredibly important," she says. "The quality of care that they can provide to infants is crucial for shaping infant development. And will have consequences for the next generation of mothers and infants."
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