What Is a Mindful Parenting Response? A Preliminary Study Connecting Mothers’ State Mindfulness to Their Neural Response to Infant and Parenting Outcomes
Mindfulness June 15, 2026 Vani Gupta, Heidemarie Laurent
Mothers who reported greater decentering—a component of state mindfulness—during a brain-scanning task showed increased activity in left ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions while viewing videos of their own 3-month-old infant in distress versus a positive situation. This neural activity predicted lower self-reported parental stress but was not associated with mindful parenting. Curiosity, another facet of state mindfulness, correlated with a smaller cluster in the left frontal pole. The findings suggest that decentering may play a role in emotion regulation during challenging parent-infant interactions and could inform mindfulness-based interventions for parental well-being.