Babies whose mothers shower them with affection are better at coping with stress when they get older, research showed today.
Nurturing and warmth in early life has "long-lasting positive effects on mental health well into adulthood", they said.
While several pieces of research sought to assess the impact of a
mother's affection, they were based on people recollecting their own
experiences.
The latest study involved psychologists assessing interactions
between mothers and their offspring when the babies were eight months
old.
Mothers were analysed to see how well they coped with their child's
developmental tests and how they responded to their child's performance.
The psychologists ranked levels of affection from negative or occasionally negative to warm, caressing or extravagant.
The mother's affection was then categorised: low (combining negative
and occasionally negative), normal (warm) and high (caressing and
extravagant).
Overall, one in 10 mother-child interactions showed low levels of
maternal affection, 85% showed normal levels and 6% showed very high
levels.
Some 482 of the youngsters were then followed up until age 34 on
average, and their reactions to different types of distress analysed.
These included stress, hostility and anger, sensitivity and anxiety,
and participants were ranked on a scale from not at all distressed by
the symptom to extremely distressed.
The group was also asked whether they thought their mothers were
affectionate towards them, with responses ranging from "strongly agree"
to "strongly disagree".
Children whose mothers gave them lots of affection handled all types of distress better, the results showed.
In particular, they were better at dealing with anxiety than those
whose mothers had shown them little affection or normal levels of
affection.
The authors said: "High levels of maternal affection are likely to
facilitate secure levels of attachment and bonding, which then translate
to lower distress levels in both childhood and adulthood."
Previous research has shown that parental bonding during childhood is
linked to lower levels of depression in young adults, higher
self-esteem and being better at adapting to distressing situations.
The experts, from North Carolina, Massachusetts and Rhode Island in
the US, published their findings in the Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health.
They concluded: "It is striking that a brief observation of level of
maternal warmth in infancy is associated with distress in adult
offspring 30 years later.
"These provocative findings add to the growing evidence that early
childhood helps set the stage for later life experiences and provide
support for the notion that biological "memories" laid down early may
alter psychological and physiological systems and produce latent
vulnerabilities or resilience to problems emerging later in adulthood.
"Thus, the quality of early socio-emotional development may have more far-reaching effects than previously believed."
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