Infant is subjectively pleasant to parents and activates in the brain, which suggests smell plays some part in bonding. If that is what it is for, the pleasantness should not stay constant while the child grows up and needs less care. Nobody had checked. So 235 parents were asked to rate the personal of their own 367 children, aged across childhood.
Pleasantness fell steadily with the child’s age. Odor pleasantness decreased as a function of how old the child was, across a sample of children averaging 9.3 years. Neither the sex of the parent nor the sex of the child contributed significantly to the effect, so this is not a mothers-and-daughters pattern. The authors propose it reflects olfactory modulation of the parent-child relationship.
Infant body odor is subjectively pleasant to parents and activates reward areas in the brain, which is why body odor perception has been proposed as a contributor to parental bonding. The proposal implies something testable. If the pleasantness exists to support caretaking, it ought to track how much caretaking is needed.
That had not been examined. Whether the perceived pleasantness of a child’s body odor varies over the course of development was simply unknown, so the authors ran an questionnaire study in a Polish sample.
Two hundred and thirty-five parents, averaging 36.9 years old, were asked to assess the personal odor pleasantness of their children. The children numbered 367 and averaged 9.3 years, spanning the ages where the relevant biological change happens.
Odor pleasantness decreased as a function of the children’s age. Neither the sex of the parent nor the sex of the child contributed significantly, which rules out the obvious same-sex and opposite-sex patterns. The authors propose that the age-related change reflects olfactory modulation of the parent-child relationship, with young children’s odor read as pleasant contributing to bonding and caretaking, which is needed less after puberty than before. It is a questionnaire, exploratory and cross-sectional, so the interpretation outruns the measurement.
wat. Parents rated their own children’s smell as less and less pleasant the older the child was, with the parent’s sex making no difference.
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It fits the function to the need. Intense pleasure at a baby’s smell is useful when the baby requires constant care, and there is no obvious reason for it to persist once a teenager does not.
How do we know?
Croy and colleagues ran an exploratory questionnaire study in a Polish sample, asking 235 parents, averaging 36.9 years old, to assess the personal odor pleasantness of their 367 children.
What is still unknown
An exploratory questionnaire study in one country, cross-sectional rather than following children over time, and based on parents rating remembered impressions rather than on any smelling task.
Learn something?
Where to next
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