Where do differences in rodential mothering style come from? Obviously, from one second, one minute, one hour, before in that rat mom’s biological history. Knowledge about epigenetic bases of this has grown at breakneck speed, showing, for example, how some epigenetic changes in the brain can have multigenerational consequences (e.g., helping to explain why being a rat, monkey, or human abused in childhood increases the odds of being an abusive parent). Just to show the scale of epigenetic complexity, differences in mothering styles in monkeys cause epigenetic changes in more than a thousand
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