Taking Care Of A Baby May Make You Want To Lose Your Cool, But Don't

Babies learn language holistically. They understand the emotional content of language, and then figure out the meanings of individual words. When infants are around angry parents, there are a multitude of effects on the infant's brain.

Baby Brains Respond to Parental Discord 24/7

University of Oregon graduate student Alice Graham, along with her committee members Drs. Phil Fisher and Jennifer Pfeifer, conducted a study of infants from high-stress homes to see if exposure to parental conflict affected the babies' brain function. Graham conducted functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the babies' brains during sleep and then compared brain function to measures of emotional stress in the home.

Graham and her supervising professors found that the more parental conflict was expressed in the home, the more MRI showed activity in the caudate, hypothalamus, rostral anerior cingulate cortex, and thalamus of the brain, the regions of the brain activated by stress. These findings are consistent with an earlier study Graham conducted that found that parental stress affects the baby's vagus nerve, which regulates heart beat and digestion.

Infant Heart, Digestion, and Excretion Also Disrupted by Stress

Two years prior to Graham's studies using MRI to measure brain changes in sleep, she studied the effects of parental stress on the development of the vagus nerve in infants. The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that is not under conscious control that tells us whether or not we are "at home." Greater activity, or "tone," of the vagus nerve corresponds with greater ability to interact with the environment.

Baby girls become more sensitive to emotions of others. Baby boys become more vigilant. And aberramt vagus nerve function has implications for later life.

The vagus nerve regulates heart beat and appetite. Irregularities in vagal nerve function cause high blood pressure and problems in controlling appetite. And since the vagus nerve also regulates "fight, flight, or freeze" reactions, abnormalities in the function of the nerve can cause a lifetime of emotional stress in personal relationships and in adjusting to changing life conditions.

The bottom line of these and other studies, however, is plain, common sense.

And if you have already lost your cool in front of your child? Babies are resilient, but if you can't control your temper, get help for both you and your baby.