However, there may be a limit to how much skilled parenting can improve a newborn’s language and cognition skills, especially in situations where the family is facing significant deprivation.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis wanted to see how “prenatal social disadvantage,” a newborn’s brain volumes and parenting factor into cognitive and language abilities. Prenatal social disadvantage refers to not having the resources to meet a family’s basic needs. To do this, they recruited from obstetric clinics in St. Louis to find pregnant people from a broad variety of backgrounds.

They followed up with approximately 200 new mothers and their newborns at ages 1 and 2 to conduct parenting observations along with language and cognition assessments. What they found was that prenatal social disadvantage is associated with lower cognition and language scores and that supportive parenting behaviors could improve those indicators — but only up to a point.

The research, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, can help inform how to improve the effectiveness of prenatal and early childhood interventions.

Researcher Deanna Barch describes “social disadvantage” as a spectrum of how much a family’s financial needs are being met. Barch is vice dean of research and a professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine.

If someone has basic needs covered such as stable access to housing, food and insurance, “then parenting can make a difference,” Barch said. “But if basic needs are not met, that’s probably what is constraining cognition, and parenting doesn’t have the opportunity to have the positive influence.”

Supportive parenting may not be able overcome the “hit” that deprivation causes to a newborn’s brain development. The research can be helpful in developing social programs that invest in prenatal care and parent training.

First author Shelby Leverett, a PhD student in neuroscience at WashU Medicine, explained they were initially surprised by the results because much of the scientific literature shows that parenting skills can be an effective intervention target, but the majority of those findings may be based on a narrower, more advantaged, sampling of the “social disadvantage” spectrum.

“It’s really important that we aim to support families so we can eliminate disadvantage and kids have a chance to develop optimally,” Leverett said.

This study was funded by R01MH113883, K01MH122735, T32NS121881, and T32MH100019 from the NIH, the March of Dimes Foundation, grant MI-II-2018-725 from the Children’s Discovery Institute, grant P50 HD103525 from the Washington University Intellectual and Developmental Disability Research Center, and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia & Depression Young Investigator Grant 28521 from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and grant KL2 TR00234.