Could a non-responsive mother make you fatter, more emotional, anxious and stressed as an adult?
Updated: Mar 17
Could a non-responsive mother in infancy make you fatter, more emotional, anxious and stressed as an adult?
Let's look at some research which suggests that this could be the case...
The research being discussed:
de Souza, J. A., da Silva, M. C., de Souza Ferraz Junior, J. C., de Souza, F. L., & de Souza, S. L. (2022). Maternal separation in the light or dark phase of the circadian cycle has different effects on the corticosterone levels and anxiety-like behavior in male adult rats. Physiology & behavior, 247, 113725. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2022.113725
Maternal separation in the light or dark phase of the circadian cycle has different effects on the corticosterone levels and anxiety-like behavior in male adult rats.
Note: for this discussion, I am equating "non-responsive mother", with the times when the rat pups are getting no maternal response (because they are separated from their mother).
The situations this applies to as humans, are those situations when a baby is alone, or has the experience of being alone and no-one is responding to it - i.e. been left alone to sleep, alone in a pram with no-one responding to it, those times when no-one is responding to its cries... it's alone.
Very often, due to the cultural push towards solitary sleep in the past 100 or so years in westernised cultures, human babies are left all alone with no response from their mothers at sleep time. Often, the baby's instinct to cry for help has also been extinguished via sleep training - so it frequently experiences maternal separation and non-responsiveness, even though it has learn not to cry out in such situations.
This is all referring to "maternal non-responsiveness" for the purpose of the following discussion.
In the experiment being discussed in this blog, maternal separation in rat pups was for 6hrs per day, for the first 1-14 days of their life.
The first 1-14 days of a rat pups life, is equivalent to the first 1yr-3.7yrs of a human's life according to this model which compares a rats life cycle and duration of infancy compared to a humans: (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3733029/ )
The maternal separation in this 2022 research, resulted in increased adult outcomes in the rats of:
increased anxiety-life behaviour in the adult mice in the group that were consistently separated from their mother for a portion of the day (compared to the control group that were never separated from the mum),
and also that group with day time separation had increased junk food intake as an adult
there was increased stress hormone levels in the adult rats that were separated from their mum for some portion of the night compared to the control group who were never separated
increased junkfood intake for this group that had maternal separation at night also
increased bad fat deposits/adipose tissue weight in the rats that had been separated from their mum for some portion of the night in infancy
The resea