If a Parent Takes a Parenting Class, Can it Change Their Teenager’s Brain?

Summary: Yes, new research shows that if a parent takes a parenting class, it can change the teenager’s brain. The research shows that in mother-daughter pairs, a mother taking a parenting class can lead to changes in the function of key areas of her daughter’s brain.

Key Points:

• Parenting style and parenting skills have a direct impact on adolescent mental health
• Adolescents with parents who practice supportive emotional parenting show fewer mental health problems than adolescents with parents who don’t practice supportive emotional parenting
• While both male and female adolescents can develop internalizing disorders such as depression or anxiety, females develop depression and anxiety more often than males
• The way a mother interacts with a daughter can have a positive or negative impact on symptoms of internalizing disorders experienced by the daughter

Adolescent Females: High Rates of Anxiety and Depression, Compared to Boys

In 2021, the Surgeon General of the United States announced the presence of a mental health crisis among youth in the United States. Various factors contributed to the crisis, including:

• Significant increases in suicidality among adolescents
• Steady increases in depression among adolescents
  • Increase in sadness, loneliness, and hopelessness
• Steady increases in anxiety among adolescents
  • Increase in worry about self, family, and the world

Over the past four years, rates of mental health disorders among youth have stabilized, and dropped slightly. That’s very good news, but we need to put it in perspective: stabilizing at high rates is not exactly the goal.

The goal is a significant reduction to lower rates.

To understand where we need to go, we need to understand where we are. To that end, let’s take a look at the current state of adolescent mental health for two internalizing disorders: anxiety and depression, as reported in the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2024 NSDUH),

First, the nationwide data on symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) among adolescents.

Past Two-Week Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Adolescents 12-17, 2024

• Mild symptoms, total: 6.0 million (23.1%)
  • Male: 2.6 million (19.2%)
  • Female: 3.4 million: (27.2%)
• Moderate symptoms, total: 2.7 million (10.6%)
  • Male: 898,000 (6.8%)
  • Female: 1.8 million (14.5%)
• Severe symptoms, total: 2.1 million (8.2%)
  • Male: 522,000 (3.9%)
  • Female: 1.6 million (12.7%)

As we can see, the data shows that millions of teens in the U.S. have anxiety, with over two million reporting severe anxiety. The data also show that females report anxiety at far greater rates than males. Females report moderate symptoms at twice the rate of males, and severe symptoms at over three times the rate of males.

Hold that thought while we review the data on depression, as measured by instances of major depressive episode (MDE), which is a proxy metric for presence of major depressive disorder (MDD). We’ll share data on MDE and MDE with severe impairment.

Past Two-Week MDE and MDE with Severe Impairment, Adolescents 12-17, 2024

MDE means major depressive episode

• MDE, total: 3.8 million (15.4%)
  • Male: 1.1 million (8.4%)
  • Female: 2.7 million: (22.6%)
• MDE with severe impairment, total: 2.8 million (11.3%)
  • Male: 735,000 (5.7%)
  • Female: 2.1 million (17.2%)

The data here mirrors the data on anxiety. Millions of adolescents have and need support for depressive disorders. When we look at the differences between males and females, we see female adolescents reporting depression at nearly three times the rate of male adolescents.

Therefore, we can say that one aspect of the youth mental health crisis is a crisis of internalizing disorders among adolescent females.

Mothers and Daughters: The Role of Parenting in Teenage Girls’ Emotion Regulation

A new study addresses the disproportionate rates of internalizing disorders among adolescent females with a novel approach. In the publication “Brain Changes After a Parenting Intervention in Adolescent Girls With Internalizing Symptoms,” a research team based in Australia examined the impact of a parenting intervention – i.e. a class for parents on parenting – on the adolescent female brain.

Researchers posed the following question:

“Does an emotion-focused parenting intervention impact brain function in early adolescent girls with elevated internalizing symptoms?”

In this study, researchers recruited 35 mother daughter pairs – called dyads – in which the daughters, ages 10-12, scored in the 50^th percentile or above on the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS), which indicates the presence of symptoms of anxiety and depression that meet clinical thresholds for diagnosis.

To conduct the study, researchers administered the RCADS to the adolescent females at the start of the study, and conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions (fMRI) on the adolescent females during implicit and explicit emotional interactions with their mothers. Previous research shows that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and amygdala are involved in emotion regulation. Therefore, to measure any changes, researchers used fMRI to establish baseline values in the PFC and amygdala in each adolescent female in the study.

The mothers involved in the study took an 8-week parenting course via Zoom, which included one hour-long session per week. The parenting intervention, called Tuning in to Teens (TINT), focuses on teaching parents – in this case, mothers – the basic concepts of supportive emotional socialization, which include:

1. Increasing awareness of adolescent emotions, particularly low-intensity emotions
2. Understanding emotions as chances to connect with a child/adolescent
3. Learning to listen to and accept the emotions expressed by their children with empathy
4. Learning to help adolescents identify and name their own emotions
5. Guiding parents through problem solving/limit setting scenarios

Let’s take a look at what they found.

When a Parent Takes a Parenting Class, It Can Change Their Teenager’s Brain

We just gave away the results. If a parent takes a parenting class, it can change their teenager’s brain.

We’ll share the details in official form though, now. First, we should point out that the researchers did not see any functional changes in the amygdala, which is typically associated with emotion. However, they did see structural and functional changes in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with emotion regulation.

Among adolescent females whose mothers received the TINT parenting intervention, researchers observed the following phenomena at 6-month follow up:

• Enhanced activity in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) during implicit emotion regulation, which involves unconscious/automatic responses to emotion-related stimuli
• Attenuated activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during explicit emotion regulation, which involves conscious, planned responses to emotion-related stimuli

Researchers concluded that increased activity in the SFG was associated with:

• Increases in supportive maternal response to adolescent sadness
• Increases in supportive maternal response to adolescent anxiety

And that decreased activity in the IFG was associated with:

• Reductions in adolescent anxiety
• Reductions in overall adolescent internalizing symptoms

Here’s how the researchers characterize these results:

“The findings of this randomized clinical trial revealed that an emotion-focused parenting intervention can impact prefrontal cortex functioning during emotion regulation in early adolescent girls with internalizing difficulties.”

In addition, the researchers observed that the neurofunctional changes revealed by fMRI were associated with changes reported by the daughters, but not the mothers, regarding improvements in maternal emotion socialization, i.e. emotional support, and associated with daughter-reported changes in internalizing symptoms.

The research team weighed in on this development as well:

“Our findings highlight the importance of including adolescent self-reports in parenting intervention research, which has predominantly relied on parent reports.”

In summary, this study is illuminating, and confirms two things we’ve experienced in our work with adolescents and their families:

1. Parent behavior and parenting skills have a significant impact on children – and now we know parenting style can actually change the way key areas of the teenage brain functions.
2. We should always listen to and include adolescent’s input on their own emotions.

At BACA, we prioritize family involvement in the therapeutic process, whether that means family therapy for everyone, or family therapy for everyone supported by additional skills training for parents.