{"id":34898,"date":"2026-10-09T12:28:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T16:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34898"},"modified":"2026-10-09T09:35:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T13:35:52","slug":"study-finds-positive-parenting-teaches-children-how-to-experience-joy-and-could-lead-to-better-mental-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/10\/study-finds-positive-parenting-teaches-children-how-to-experience-joy-and-could-lead-to-better-mental-health\/","title":{"rendered":"Study finds positive parenting teaches children how to experience joy\u2014and could lead to better mental health"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than one in five adults in the US experience mental illness each year, according to data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness<\/a>. And more than one in seven young people ages 6\u201317 experience a mental health disorder, with 50 percent of all mental illness occurring throughout one\u2019s lifetime beginning by age 14 and 75 percent by age 24.<\/p>\n

Psychologists have long espoused that how parents raise their children during their early years of life has a huge impact on their mental health and happiness as they grow up. Something as simple as praising or scolding a child can be deeply internalized and could determine whether or not that child struggles with depression, anxiety, or substance use as a teenager or young adult.<\/p>\n

But how and where the connection is made between parenting behaviors and future susceptibility to a mental health disorder is harder to discern. Notre Dame psychologist Kaylin Hill<\/a> has devoted the past 15 years of her career to better understanding emotions and depression\u2014and how to break the cycle of intergenerational mental health issues.<\/p>\n

Hill, an assistant professor in Notre Dame\u2019s Department of Psychology<\/a>, has found that parents\u2019 child-rearing methods during the preschool years coincide with how that child experiences joy and satisfaction across adolescence\u2014a period during which the risk for mental health issues is at its highest. Her research was recently published<\/a> in Communications Psychology<\/em>, part of the Nature<\/em> journal suite of publications.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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,\u201d said Hill, a clinical psychologist and faculty affiliate with Notre Dame\u2019s Shaw Center for Children and Families<\/a>and Eck Institute for Global Health<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hill focuses her work on how to reduce the burden and strain of depression<\/strong> on individuals and families; and through her directorship of Notre Dame\u2019s Psychophysiology of Affect across the Lifespan (PAL) Lab<\/a>, she seeks to understand what makes those individuals vulnerable in the first place and how best to intervene.<\/p>\n

Finding the common thread between behaviors and future susceptibility<\/h3>\n

Hill and her research team began their work by observing the one-on-one interactions and parenting behavior between 3-year-old children and their parents. They then compared that data to the development of neural reward responsiveness\u2014how the brain responds to rewards or positive stimuli\u2014of those same children at ages 9, 12, 15, and 18. This longitudinal study spanned 15 years and included 465 young people and their parents at Stony Brook University in New York, and was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.<\/p>\n

Previous research has shown that adequate reward processing in the brain is necessary for adolescents and adults to experience joy, excitement, and pleasure\u2014a phenomenon that can even be seen in early childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis study is really the first of its kind that measures what early life experiences are associated with reward processing from childhood through late adolescence or early adulthood,\u201d Hill said. \u201cAnd reward processing seems to be one of those pieces to the puzzle of what may put us at risk for developing mental disorders. Being able to observe reward processing, and how it develops from ages 9 to 18, is really helpful to understanding depression risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

When watching the 3-year-old children and their parents interact in the laboratory at the start of the study, Hill and her team coded how often they saw positive parenting behaviors (displaying warmth, support, and encouragement) versus negative parenting behaviors (being harsh, heavy-handed, or overly intrusive).<\/p>\n

Those coded interactions were compared to the data recorded from the brain\u2019s responses to rewarding stimuli. With an electroencephalogram (EEG), which uses small electrodes attached to the scalp through a cap to record the brain\u2019s electrical activity, the scientists were able to track reward processing at the brain level.<\/p>\n

In this study, the researchers used money as the reward for winning a guessing game, which allowed them to look at the brain\u2019s electrical signals in response to a win versus a loss. Because the EEG system is adaptable to a range of individuals across abilities and cognitive stages, the scientists were able to assess reward processing at the brain level beginning at age 9 and followed up at ages 12, 15, and 18.<\/p>\n

Their findings indicated that the children who experienced higher levels of positive parenting got more excited about winning the money, while the children raised with a more negative parenting style were less enthusiastic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we saw is that the more positive, and less negative<\/strong>, parenting behaviors we observed at age 3, the larger the brain\u2019s reward response seemed to be for individuals across adolescence,\u201d Hill said.<\/p>\n

In other words, the more praise and affirmation children receive from their parents at a young age, the better they are at recognizing the joyful things in life. The work of Hill and her team demonstrated that positive parenting experienced in the early years may teach children\u2019s brains how to respond to good things\u2014fun activities, friendships, success, and well-being.<\/p>\n

On the flip side, if a parent is particularly harsh or intrusive, that child\u2019s brain may develop a low reward response\u2014a difficulty experiencing pleasure and happiness that subsequently opens the door to sadness and despondency.<\/p>\n

\u201cExperiencing positive parenting seems to help facilitate reward processing, which is important for promoting physical and mental health,\u201d added Hill, who is also a faculty affiliate with Notre Dame\u2019s Neuroscience and Behavior<\/a> program and its Human Neuroimaging Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Discoveries point toward possibility of early intervention<\/h3>\n

The study\u2019s findings point to an opportunity for intervention, which Hill believes may need to include parents and children. She says it is critical to support parents\u2014perhaps even before their child is born\u2014as well as children and adolescents, in order to address the series of events from parent behaviors observed at age 3 to child development from ages 3 to 18. She notes that while this study was observational, it gives important clues for how experiences and development may unfold over time.<\/p>\n

Current research indicates that the most reliable and prominent predictor of depression is family history, paired with the experience of a stressful life event. According to Hill, this study opens up a world of possibilities in terms of what intervention could look like. \u201cThere\u2019s something very important about early parent-child interactions and parenting behaviors,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I love that because behaviors are so much more open to intervention than a genetic explanation to what is driving risk within families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hill and her team hope their work can inform a broader conversation about how to prevent depression, one of the most prevalent and debilitating mental disorders. \u201cWe are trying to pull together a single strand\u2014one explanation of likely many that exists\u2014of what puts someone at risk and how we can intervene,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Contact: <\/strong>Erin Blasko, director of media engagement, 574-631-4127, eblasko@nd.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Communications Psychology<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than one in five adults in the US experience mental illness each year, according to data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And more than one in seven young people ages 6\u201317 experience a mental health disorder, with 50 percent of all mental illness occurring throughout one\u2019s lifetime beginning by age 14 and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34899,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[368,345,789,349,1179,7],"tags":[123,14,122,568,49,511,1209],"class_list":["post-34898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communication","category-depression-2","category-family","category-happiness-2","category-mental-health","category-relationships","tag-anxiety","tag-depression","tag-emotions-2","tag-kindness","tag-mental-health","tag-parenting","tag-positive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34900,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34898\/revisions\/34900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}