As a child, did your mother listen to you, play with you and encourage you tirelessly? This caring style of education would not only reassure: a large American study suggests that it would be linked to a higher level of intelligence in children.
Published in the scientific journal Intelligencethis research followed more than a thousand children from 14 months to 10 years old to measure the effect of maternal support on thechild’s intelligence. The authors observed early mother-baby interactions and then linked them to changes in IQ throughout childhood.
Maternal support impacts children’s IQ
Psychologists Curtis S. Dunkel, Dimitri van der Linden and Tetsuya Kawamoto relied on data from theEarly Head Start Research and Evaluation Studyi.e. 1,075 children followed between 1996 and 2010. At 14, 24 then 36 months, the mother and child were filmed during a “3 bags task”, a game with different toys to assess parental sensitivity, cognitive stimulation and positive regard.
At the same time, the children took tests of vocabulary, early gestures and mental development between 14 months and 10 years, grouped into an index of general intelligence. Researchers observe that higher maternal support is consistently associated with better scores, even when controlling for the intelligence of the mother herself.
Dr Dunkel said he was surprised to see the marked influence of maternal support on intelligence generala topic that could be the subject of future research. “Mothers mostly teach specific skills (like reading), so why would that impact general intelligence?” he admits to PsyPost.
What education should we prioritize on a daily basis?
In this study, “maternal support” does not describe a perfect mother, but a warm, attentive and stimulating presence. Concretely, it involves responding to the child’s signals, letting him explore in safety, talking to him a lot and valuing his efforts rather than just his successes.
The recommendations follow this logic: respond attentively to the child’s needs, play and explore with him, show affection, express his pride and do not hide his love. Older work on the Self-Determination Theory They also emphasize that cognitive stimulation and the encouragement of autonomy constitute key levers of intellectual development.
An effect nevertheless limited in time
The data remains nuanced when we follow these children later. The authors recall, in line with the Wilson effect, that the shared family environment is especially important at the beginning of life, then that differences in intelligence in adulthood are largely linked to genetics and individual experiences. The results of the study are summarized as follows:Maternal support influences general intelligence from an early age. However, previous research clearly shows that this effect disappears in adulthood, so the vast majority of adult intelligence differences are due to genetics. It is still unclear why these early environmental effects seem to fade away completely. This means that although maternal support is important in the short term, its importance does not matter in the long term.“, reports Curtis Dunkel.
Far from the myth of the perfect mother, researchers emphasize simple everyday gestures, talking, playing, encouraging autonomy, which seem sufficient to support early intellectual development.