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Hand a small child something good — a biscuit, a balloon, a puddle worth jumping in — and watch what happens in the next two seconds.
Some light up like a switch was flipped. Others barely register it. They take the good thing, hold it, and wait to see what you do.
Most of us file that under personality. Some people are sunny. Some are not. That is just how it goes.
A team of researchers spent fifteen years testing that assumption, and what they found about positive parenting and joy is stranger, and kinder, than “some children are simply happier than others.”
What positive parenting and joy have to do with each other
The study was led by Kaylin Hill, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, and published in 2026 in the journal Communications Psychology. It followed 465 young people and their parents, recruited at Stony Brook University in New York, with funding from the United States National Institute of Mental Health.
It began when the children were three years old.
Researchers brought each parent and child into a room and watched them play together. Trained coders counted two kinds of behaviour. On one side: warmth, support, encouragement. On the other: harshness, heavy-handedness, and the hovering sort of help that quietly takes the task out of a child’s hands.
Then everyone went home, and the researchers waited six years.
When the children were nine, they came back and put on a cap of electrodes. They did it again at twelve. Again at fifteen. Again at eighteen.
One pattern held the whole way through. The children who had received more warmth and less harshness at age three showed a bigger brain response to good news as teenagers.
The detail almost every write-up leaves out
Here is the part worth slowing down for.
The researchers did not measure joy. They could not. Nobody has a joy meter.
What they measured is far narrower and far stranger: a small blip of electrical activity that appears in the brain a fraction of a second after a person finds out they have won something. Researchers call it reward positivity. In this study, the young people played a simple guessing game for small sums of money while electrodes recorded the instant they learned whether they had won or lost.
That is the whole test. A guessing game. A little money. A flicker on a screen.
So why does anyone care about a flicker?
Because it is one of the most reliable markers researchers have for the risk of depression. When that response is blunted, it sits on the path toward the flattening doctors call anhedonia, the loss of pleasure in things you used to love. Hill has described the link as one of the largest neural indicators of mental health risk identified so far.
In plain words: they were not measuring how happy these teenagers were. They were measuring whether good news could still land.
Those are different things, and the second one is the more interesting one. Happiness depends on what happens to you. The capacity to receive it depends on something you learned before you could spell your own name.
What the coders were actually counting
“Positive parenting” sounds like a philosophy, or a book you were supposed to read. In this study it was neither. It was a tally of small, ordinary, unglamorous behaviours in one room on one afternoon.
Leaning in. Saying something encouraging. Letting the child lead the game. Not grabbing the toy to demonstrate the correct way. Not sighing. Not taking over.
Not one thing on that list costs money. Not one requires a course, a bigger home, or spare hours you do not have. That is worth noticing, because most of what predicts a child’s future is expensive, and this was not.
One honest limit, which the design itself creates: the positive behaviours and the negative ones were combined into a single measure. So the study cannot tell us whether adding warmth matters more than removing harshness, or the other way around. Anyone who tells you it can is going further than the evidence does.
Before anyone feels ill about this
This is the point where a parent reading late at night starts doing arithmetic about a bad year.
Stop.
The study watched; it did not test. Hill said plainly that it offers important clues about how experience and development unfold together, not proof that one caused the other. Families who were warmer in that room differ from other families in a hundred ways besides warmth, and no study that only observes can pull those apart.
It is also worth remembering what was measured: one afternoon, in an unfamiliar room, with strangers watching, when the child was three. That is a snapshot. It is not a verdict on a childhood.
What is genuinely useful is the direction Hill points afterwards. The strongest predictor of depression currently available is a family history plus a hard life event, and no one can change either of those. Behaviour can change. That is her argument for why this line of work is worth doing at all: it points at something that can be supported rather than something to be endured.
What if the three-year-old in question was you?
Plenty of people reading this are not parents. They are the grown version of the child in the study, the one who has slowly noticed they cannot really enjoy anything. The good news that arrived and felt like nothing. The rare free day spent waiting for it to go wrong.
If that is you, the useful question is not “what did my parents do.” It is “what did I learn to expect?” Patterns laid down that early tend to surface as expectations rather than memories, which is why a short attachment style quiz can be strangely revealing. It asks about now, not then.
And here is the quietly hopeful thing about a learned expectation. It was learned. That makes it a habit of reading the world, not a fact about you. Habits move.
The brother nobody remembers
There is a very old story about a man with two sons, and nearly everyone knows the first half. The younger son takes his share of the family money, spends it badly, comes home braced to be treated as a servant, and gets a party instead.
The half people forget is the brother who stayed.
He is out working when the music starts, and he will not come inside. When his father comes out to him, his complaint turns out not to be about his brother at all. It is this: in all these years of working here, nobody ever gave me so much as a young goat, so I could celebrate with my friends.
Sit with that, because it is an extraordinary thing to say. He never claims he was refused. He never asked. He stood in a house with a full kitchen and a father who threw parties at the slightest provocation, and concluded that celebrating was not available to him. So he kept score instead, which is the quiet kind of scorekeeping that looks like loyalty from the outside.
The father’s reply is not a defence. It is closer to bewilderment. Everything the family has, he tells him, has been yours this entire time.
Which is a very old way of saying what the electrodes were saying. The good thing was there. The only question was whether it could be taken in.
People have believed for a long time that God is not a withholder but a celebrator, and that joy was never the thing being rationed. That old story ends with a father standing outside in the dark, asking a grown son to please come in to the party. It never tells us whether he did.
A good place to start: The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day is a short guide to noticing the good that is already in the room, in ordinary days that do not feel remarkable. Get the free guide. Free.
Where this leaves you on an ordinary Tuesday
You cannot go back and rerun the afternoon when you were three. Neither can your parents. That ship sailed, and none of this research is asking you to chase it.
What is on offer is smaller and much nearer. Something good is going to turn up this week. Someone will say a kind thing, or the rain will stop, or a small person will hold up a drawing. The only real question the research raises is whether you will let it land, or file it and get back to work.
Letting it land is a skill. Skills get practised. Start with something about the size of a biscuit.
Small things worth trying this week
- Say the good thing out loud. Within the hour, to an actual person. Naming it is what keeps it from sliding past.
- When a child shows you something, stop moving. Put the phone face down. Three seconds of full attention does more than three minutes of distracted praise.
- Do not improve it. If the tower is crooked or the drawing is wrong, leave it. The correction is heard louder than the compliment.
- Catch yourself deflecting. Next time someone gives you a compliment, notice the reflex to shrink it. Say thank you and stop the sentence there.
- Accept one thing without repaying it. A favour, a meal, an offer of help. Let the ledger stay open for a week and see how it feels.
A question for you
Is the capacity for joy something a person is mostly born with, or something they are mostly taught? Most of us have a strong instinct about this, and the instinct usually says more about our own house growing up than about the science. We would honestly like to know where you land. Leave a comment and tell us.
If you want to share this
- They watched parents play with their three-year-olds, then scanned those children’s brains at 9, 12, 15 and 18. Fifteen years later, the warmth was still showing up. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=118779
- Turns out they never measured joy. They measured whether good news could still land. That is not the same thing, and it might be the more important one. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=118779
- Everyone remembers the son who left. Almost nobody remembers the one who stayed home and never once asked for a party. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=118779
Questions people ask about positive parenting and joy
What did the Notre Dame study on positive parenting and joy actually find?
A 15-year study led by psychologist Kaylin Hill at the University of Notre Dame, published in 2026 in the journal Communications Psychology, followed 465 young people and their parents. Researchers observed parent-child play when the children were three years old, coding warmth, support and encouragement on one side and harshness and intrusiveness on the other. They then measured the children’s brain responses to winning in a simple guessing game at ages 9, 12, 15 and 18. Children who experienced more positive and less negative parenting at age three showed larger brain reward responses across adolescence. The study is observational, so it shows a link rather than proof of cause.
Does positive parenting actually cause children to feel more joy?
No study so far can show that, and the researchers do not claim it. The 2026 Notre Dame study was observational: researchers watched families rather than testing an intervention, so the link they found cannot establish cause and effect. Families who are warmer with a three-year-old also differ in many other ways, and an observational design cannot separate those influences. Lead author Kaylin Hill described the findings as offering important clues about how experience and development unfold together, not proof that parenting caused the outcome.
What is reward positivity and why do researchers measure it?
Reward positivity is a small, fast electrical response in the brain, recorded with EEG electrodes on the scalp, that appears shortly after a person learns they have won or gained something. Researchers measure it because a blunted reward response is one of the most reliable known markers of risk for depression, and it is closely tied to anhedonia, the reduced ability to feel pleasure. In the 2026 Notre Dame study, reward positivity was measured while participants played a guessing game for small amounts of money at ages 9, 12, 15 and 18.
Is it too late to change if someone grew up without much warmth?
Nothing in this research says a person’s capacity for joy is fixed. The study measured brain responses at four points across childhood and adolescence and found they develop over time, not that they are set at age three. What is learned early tends to show up as an expectation about how the world works, and expectations can shift with practice and with different relationships. Small, free habits help: naming good things out loud as they happen, accepting a compliment without shrinking it, and letting a kindness go unrepaid. Persistent loss of pleasure is also a recognised symptom worth raising with a doctor.
What counts as positive parenting in research like this?
In the 2026 Notre Dame study, positive parenting was not a philosophy or a method but a count of specific observed behaviours during ordinary play: warmth, support and encouragement, including letting the child lead the activity. The negative side of the measure covered harshness, being heavy-handed, and being overly intrusive, such as taking a task out of a child’s hands to demonstrate the correct way. None of the positive behaviours require money, equipment or training. Because the study combined positive and negative behaviours into one measure, it cannot say whether adding warmth or removing harshness matters more.
Source: the study was reported in coverage of Hill and colleagues’ 2026 paper in Communications Psychology.
