Your bond with your baby will affect him as a teen
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Caring parents with baby lying in bed. Horizontal Shot. (iStock)
The bond a baby forges with his or her parents may have big implications for the child's mental health as a teenager, a study finds. Researchers evaluated children's behavior starting at the age of four months, watching how they reacted to seeing their mothers after a period apart, PsychCentral reports.
Those who happily greeted their parents before venturing off to explore were deemed to have secure bonds; those who stayed away or seemed upset were seen as having insecure bonds.
The scientists also studied whether the children were "behaviorally inhibited": Did they retreat when confronted with new people or things? Many years later, 165 of those children, as well as their parents, discussed the now-teenage subjects' experiences with anxiety, as the researchers report in Child Development.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The team found that the kids who had been behaviorally inhibited and had had insecure bonds with their parents showed higher levels of anxiety as teens; the link was particularly pronounced among boys.
"The most important message from this study is that competent, responsive parents who form a secure relationship with their young children can be an extremely important protective factor in their child’s development," a researcher tells the University of Waterloo's news service.
(Another interesting study finds that for moms, the smell of their newborns is like a drug.)
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}This article originally appeared on Newser: Babies' Bond With Parents Helps Fight Teen Anxiety
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