In our reporting on children in poverty in Colorado, we keep coming across research about how growing up poor can actually change a child's brain. As it turns out one of the leading researchers in the country on this is based at The University of Denver. Assistant professor Pilyoung Kim directs the Family and Child Neuroscience Lab and she's looking at how chronic stress and poverty gets into the brain's of new moms.
The job of parenting is so hard, "actually it’s pretty amazing that a lot of us are willing to do it," says Kim. She studies how poverty and stress influence brain development. Kim's especially interested in the way chronic stress may disrupt these adaptive changes in the brain and in turn, increase risk for post-partum depression and harsh parenting.
One of the reasons people have babies, she says, is because they find the emotional connection with their babies so rewarding. But for mothers to feel that emotion, their brain has to undergo big changes. Studies show it actually grows and rewires, particularly in the regions known as the "reward circuits."
[For more of this story, written by Jenny Brundin, go to http://www.cpr.org/news/story/...n-and-her-babys-well]
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