Exploring the link between maternal care and attachment in mouse pups

Children can sometimes develop health, behavioral, and attachment issues that persist when their needs are not met by their caregiver. New from eNeuro, Arie Kaffman and colleagues at Yale University School of Medicine explored whether mouse pups also experience these issues from early life adversity. Their discoveries provide an opportunity for researchers to explore the mechanisms of health and behavioral deficits from early life adversity. 

When the researchers limited bedding for making nests, this impaired maternal care and increased stress hormone signaling in pups after just 1 week. Offspring also experienced long-term stunted growth trajectories. Behaviorally, while some attachment behaviors remained unchanged, many were affected: Pups vocalized less when they were separated from their mothers after 1 week, did not approach their mothers after about 2 weeks, and had anxiety-like behavior by week 3.

Says Kaffman, "Giving credit where credit is due, work in rats relates an increased stress response from impaired maternal care to attachment deficits. But this work was only done in one age group. We used thorough, 24/7 videotape footage of moms and their pups to show how impaired maternal care leads to attachment deficits at different timepoints." Kaffman emphasizes that this isn't a linear relationship. "It seems that there is a threshold for how bad maternal care must be to disrupt the offspring's behavior. This supports an existing hypothesis that you don't have to be a perfect parent, you just need to provide adequate care."