That moment when your baby meets your reach to pick her up and molds to your body as you hold her. When your preschooler calls out to you, emphatically pointing at the crescent moon he discovered, and you join him in looking up at the night sky. Or when your fifth grader catches your proud gaze in the audience of other parents during her elementary school graduation ceremony.
According to emotion scientist Barbara Fredrickson, these small moments are when love happens between parents and their children.
Her research highlights that positive emotions like love, joy, and gratitude help us grow and become better versions of ourselves. While she used to think that all positive emotions were equally helpful, she has come to realize that love might be unique.
She now calls out love as especially beneficial for our health and growth. Apart from slowing down aging, love broadens our awareness of others’ needs and increases our feelings of social connection and oneness with others. Children who have early loving relationships with their parents grow up to be more compassionate adults.
We interviewed Fredrickson about how love grows between parents and their children and why it is important for children’s development.
How Love Differs From Other Emotions
Maryam Abdullah: Your definition of love is different from most conventional definitions. Can you explain how you see love between parents and children?
Barbara Fredrickson: I study emotions, especially positive emotions. One thing that is true of all emotions is that they are short-lived: They last for seconds, maybe minutes, but not hours, weeks, days, years, or a lifetime.
Love is obviously very complex, but one piece of it is an emotional piece. What I study is love the emotion as moments—even micro-moments—of shared positivity that are accompanied with mutual care, concern, and a synchrony that shows up both behaviorally (in terms of nonverbal synchrony) and also biologically (in terms of physiological synchrony). I’m looking for the most elemental unit of love, and that elemental unit of love is these positive warm connections that involve synchrony.
It’s different than the kind of shared positivity you might have if you’re both watching a funny movie. This is more about shared positivity in connection, and when that occurs in a caring way with synchrony, those moments of positive emotions seem to be especially nutritious for our growth and development.
We know from research on parents, infants, and young children that responsive, positive connection is an important resource that helps develop the greater sense of bondedness and trust between parents and kids.
We know from research on parents, infants, and young children that responsive, positive connection is an important resource that helps develop the greater sense of bondedness and trust between parents and kids.
MA: What happens in their minds and bodies when children experience love from their parents?
BF: There is this synchrony in the tempo of action and connection, often through eye contact and touch, that is evident when we see a parent and child really connecting or showing this positive dance of responsiveness that is also connected to physiological synchrony. For example, there’s some work coming out of Ruth Feldman’s research labthat shows synchrony in subtle shifts in oxytocin.
Oxytocin is the neuropeptide that has been linked to social connectedness, bondedness, caring, and protecting people you love, and also plays a complex role in in-group versus out-group relations. Oxytocin, which has often been related to big bonding moments like sexual activity, childbirth, and lactation, also shows subtle shifts that are associated with these warm moments of connection. These ways in which people, including parents and their kids, co-experience positive emotions have clear biological signatures.
There is some evidence to suggest that there’s an important neural synchrony, as well. The more two individuals are sharing the same moment, ideas, or focus, their neural activity ends up being very similar. We’ve done some work to show that there’s synchrony in other biological signals like heart rate and respiration.
Finding Opportunities to Show Love
MA: Attunement seems to be an important prerequisite for us to experience love, but this can be hard for parents when they are trying to juggle work and family demands. What are some ways parents can tune into their children more so that love can flourish?
BF: I think having an appreciation for those moments that are the most elemental unit of love and how those are what help people and children feel loved and feel that they can trust and be open. What I like about this theory, which is what I call positivity resonance theory, is that it helps to point out how you would create this mysterious thing that we call love, and these other mysterious things called trust and commitment, because we know we can’t just talk ourselves into loving and trusting.
One of the things we know about positivity resonance is that there are a few preconditions for such moments to emerge. One of them is a sense of safety in this current circumstance that allows you to be more open and other-focused. Sometimes people think of safety as a monolithic thing—that you’re either in a safe home or neighborhood or not. But there are momentary shifts in perceived safety—when you feel safe in this moment and context.
The other precondition for positivity resonance to emerge is real-time sensory connection, best exemplified by being face to face. It’s also possible to achieve somewhat through shared voice only, but eye contact seems to be central to this. If we take this notion seriously of real-time sensory connection as being a necessary platform for positivity resonance or momentary love to emerge, then a parent can support that by putting away all other distractions. The day-to-day experiences of love can’t be supported when our attention is drawn to so many different things. So prioritize those activities and moments in your day when you can jointly experience something fun, silly, and comforting together, and recognize that touch, eye contact, and tracking one another’s emotions is your key to that.
One of the best examples of positivity resonance are those moments of smiling at a baby and of trying to get a baby to smile back at you—that is a delicate dance. You need to bring your full attention to it, but also be really attuned to what level of [intensity] is appropriate for that baby because if you come on too strong, you can make the baby cry instead of laugh even if your intention is to make it fun.
The day-to-day experiences of love can’t be supported when our attention is drawn to so many different things. So prioritize those activities and moments in your day when you can jointly experience something fun, silly, and comforting together.
We just need to be able to find the spirit of that moment that works with older children, because now it’s a little more through conversation, maybe a little less emphasis just on nonverbal expression, but nonverbal