A new study finds that how parents talk to their babies can influence their sense of empathy as they grow older, a news release from the University of York stated.
In the new findings, which appeared in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers studied 40 moms with their babies when they were aged 10, 12, 16, and 20 months old.
The team of psychologists documented parental language as the mom played with her child for 10 minutes.
Each time, the psychologists logged every instance when the mom made "mind-related comments" — interpreting the child's thoughts through the behavior showed.
Researchers then revisited the mother and child pairs when the kids were five to six years old and they assessed the child's "Theory of Mind" or their socio-cognitive abilities through a method called "strange stories."
The release stated that the method involves reading to children a "fictional vignette" involving social situations, including white lies, joke, persuasion, misunderstanding, and pretend.
The psychologists then analyzed the children and recorded the level at which they were able to feel empathetic towards others and become considerate of other people's thoughts.
Psychologists conducted a comprehension test after and the results showed that maternal mind-mindedness is strongly associated with high scoring on the strange stories task.
The researchers concluded that a child's ability to be empathetic when they were five years old had something to do with how mind-minded their moms were towards them as babies.
"These findings show how a mother's ability to tune-in to her baby's thoughts and feelings early on helps her child to learn to empathize with the mental lives of other people," said Elizabeth Kirk, lecturer at the University of York.
Kirk added that being mind-minded towards babies can have a positive effect on a child's social development.
The results of the new study show how it is important for mothers to have a conversational interaction with their children during infancy, and provide evidence to a previous study on mind-mindedness parenting conducted by psychologists Elizabeth Meins and Charles Fernyhough.
