Parenting quality at age 3 predicts adolescent reward responsiveness

By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDReviewed by Lauren HardakerJul 22 2026

Parenting observed at age 3 was linked to how the brain responded to monetary rewards across the following 15 years, highlighting one potential pathway through which early family experiences relate to adolescent development.

Study: Early parenting is associated with the development of neural reward responsiveness from childhood through adolescence. Image Credit: lemono / Shutterstock

A recent study, published as an Article in Press in the journal Communications Psychology, found that early parenting is associated with the development of reward responsiveness from late childhood through adolescence.

Reward Responsiveness Changes Across Late Childhood

Mental and physical health depend to a large extent on behaviors shaped by rewards throughout development. Reward responsiveness is a fundamental process within the “positive valence systems” that govern how individuals anticipate, obtain, and respond to positively experienced stimuli and rewards.

Altered positive valence system functioning has been linked to psychopathology, particularly depression and substance use.

Literature suggests that reward responsiveness follows a curvilinear pattern, first increasing from childhood through adolescence and then decreasing into adulthood. Scientists hypothesize that this supports increasing independence.

Prior research has demonstrated individual differences in reward responsiveness. Not much is known about the role of early exposures, which likely contribute to this variation. Importantly, these are not independent of genetic and temperamental factors, all of which interact biologically and functionally with each other.

Parenting Behavior and Reward Responsiveness

Parenting styles and childhood stress are notable early experiences that seem to play important roles and may help explain individual differences in the initial level and trajectory of reward responsiveness development. More positive parenting is associated with higher reward responses, whereas less positive parenting has been linked to reduced reward responsiveness. The findings from stress-related studies are less clear.

The current study examined how reward responsiveness develops from childhood to late adolescence using reward positivity (RewP). Reward positivity is a brain response to feedback indicating whether a monetary reward was won or lost, measured by electroencephalography (EEG). RewP is used as a neurophysiological indicator of reward responsiveness.

The researchers also analyzed how early parenting behaviors and stress exposure were associated with developmental trajectories of reward responsiveness.

Study Characteristics

The researchers analyzed data from 465 young people with usable EEG data at one or more assessment waves enrolled in the Stony Brook Temperament Study, an ongoing prospective community cohort study. The parenting analyses included 457 participants, whereas the stress analyses included 464. Most families participating in the study were White and middle-class, and half had college-level or higher education.

Participants underwent assessments every three years from age 3 through age 18. RewP was measured at approximately ages 9, 12, 15, and 18 in response to a monetary reward task administered as part of a larger EEG assessment battery.

The researchers also assessed maternal parenting behavior, analyzing only maternal data because more than 95% of parents who completed the teaching tasks were mothers, using observed parent-child interactive teaching tasks. The parameters included parent support, confidence, instruction, intrusiveness, and hostility.

Stress exposure was also examined at age 3 with the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA), which captured cumulative stressful life events from birth to age 3. Maternal lifetime depression was also assessed when the child was 3 and 9 years old.

Associations Between Reward Responsiveness and Parenting Behavior

The findings suggest that early parenting may be associated with the development of neural reward responsiveness across childhood and adolescence, potentially providing one pathway through which early experiences relate to later health and well-being.

The RewP to both winning and losing feedback showed a quadratic trajectory over the assessment period. The primary analyses focused on RewP to winning feedback. This supports the nonlinear pattern of development across childhood and adolescence.

Only early positive parenting behavior was positively associated with higher modeled RewP to winning feedback at the initial EEG assessment and with a steeper rise from late childhood to mid-adolescence, followed by a sharper decline by late adolescence in RewP to winning over time. Negative parenting was not significantly associated with RewP to winning feedback at the initial EEG assessment.

However, higher observed negative parenting at age 3 was associated with a weaker increase in RewP to win over time, reflected in both the linear and quadratic trends. Conversely, associations with early stress exposure were not statistically significant.

Comparison With Earlier Literature

These findings are not entirely consistent with earlier studies suggesting that negative and positive parenting are separate dimensions. This difference could be due to the shared teaching-task measurement strategy used in this study.

The authors postulate that negative and positive parental styles are neither completely overlapping nor wholly independent. Rather, they could be part of a broader range of parenting behavior that was prospectively associated with reward responsiveness over the following 15 years.

They also suggest that the lack of association with early stress exposure may reflect buffering by early parenting. The relatively limited range and severity of stress exposure in this lower-risk sample may also have reduced the ability to detect an association. Studies including more children exposed to severe life events and trauma may better characterize these associations, according to the authors.

The authors noted that multiple interactions occur each day between parents and children, apart from the teaching-task assessment used here. Many other environmental factors may also influence reward responsiveness.

These may include the parents’ physical presence, their feelings and thoughts about the child, and family- or community-wide interactions involving the child as well.

Limitations

The study had several limitations, such as the possibility that asking parents to teach their children during the task increased parental intrusiveness, which could have affected the observed parenting behavior. Other approaches might help capture parenting styles in a more natural context across different stages of development.

The sample was predominantly White, and the parenting analyses were limited to mothers, limiting the generalizability.

Positive and negative parenting behavior were closely correlated, making it more difficult to identify which parenting dimension was more strongly associated with the reward responsiveness trajectory. Additionally, after accounting for neural responses to losing as a time-varying covariate, only negative parenting was still associated with the reward responsiveness trajectory. When the researchers instead used a win-minus-loss difference score, neither parenting measure predicted the trajectory.

Conclusions

Taken together, these findings suggest that parenting behaviors observed at a single assessment point in early childhood were associated with the developmental trajectory of reward responsiveness through late adolescence.

The authors suggest that they “provide further empirical evidence as to how preventive interventions targeting parent-child interactions could support resilience across adolescence.” However, the observational study cannot establish that changing parenting behavior would alter reward responsiveness.