Parenting techniques can improve your child’s behaviour by changing their brain, says top psychiatrist

There was an academic as well as personal reason for his interest, too. Craig had worked as a forensic psychiatrist, and during the time that he assessed criminal psychopaths, he developed an interest in anti-social behaviour. He cites the case of Phineas Gage, a railway worker in America who suffered a horrendous injury through his skull in the early 19th Century that led to him shifting from being nice and polite to anti-social, which contributed to the theory that what happens in the brain affects behaviour.

“At that point, there were two competing theories about what caused people to be criminal psychopaths or anti-social,” Craig explains. One theory centered on the brain’s amygdala (that triggers the fight or flight response), while the other theory hinged on an area called the orbital frontal cortex – and there is a tract that links two areas of the latter that nobody had looked at before. “We subsequently found that’s the same tract that got severed in Phineas Gage,” says Craig.

Alongside psychiatrist colleague Marco Catani, Craig looked at these tracts connecting the two brain regions, and found they were abnormal in adults with psychopathy and antisocial behaviour. When in their next study they looked at those brain connections in children with conduct problems, they found those too were abnormal. One of the studies that Craig next conducted with other colleagues at King’s College London aimed to explore if that connection could be repaired.

Craig says: “We know that in kids with conduct problems, you can get to them early enough, which is basically before the age of ten, and use parenting techniques [to shift behaviour]. There is the “Incredible Years” parenting programme, after which 50 per cent of children go from being defined as conduct-disordered to not. So, the fundamental question is: if kids change, are there changes in the brain?”

They recruited 100 children with conduct problems (and 50 without, for control purposes), scanning them before their parents underwent the 12-week “Incredible Years” parenting programme, and afterwards. They looked at the brains of children with conduct problems who had responded to the treatment and discovered that they had indeed changed.

“If you're finding changes in the brain that are happening as a result of something like parenting, it’s big news,” says Craig.

“Lots of people think of anything that's psychological as being a bit fluffy and not real or scientific. So when you find biological changes in the brain, that is interesting to people.”

Craig was himself fascinated by the results. After all, when he was writing his proposal for the grant to fund the research, he thought there would “probably” be some changes in brain function, but he was “less optimistic” that they would find any changes in brain structure over such a short period of time. Though, he points to former research into differences in the brain networks of taxi drivers who had learnt The Knowledge that supported this possibility.

“But I still thought, ‘I'm not convinced that after 12 weeks of parent training, kids’ brain structure is going to change that much,’ particularly in the tract that I was interested in. I thought that would be lucky. I think of the brain structure as being a bit more hard-wired and function being a bit more plastic. But it turns out that actually the structure does change.”

Children with conduct problems learn differently to those without, and they also do not respond to reward and punishment in the same way. However, the way in which they learned seemed to improve as a result of the changes in how their parents were parenting, and that was mapped onto changes in the brain where there were regions that were less active prior to the training and more active afterwards.

The take home message, of course, is that the brain is responsive to parent training.

“Moving away from punishing and towards rewarding and being more consistent in parenting was associated with greater change,” says Craig.

“This paper shows that there is something that's changing in the kids who are responding to parent training, and it links in with the reward networks. If you reward your kids and don't smack them and are consistent, you can change a lot of children's behaviour through parent training.”

He adds, “but not all kids are responsive, and we still need to find ways to manage children who aren't responsive to these parenting programmes.”

This all has hugely positive implications for the futures of children with conduct problems. The economic costs of conduct disorder are huge, and then there's the emotional cost to the person and their families. “We know that kids with anti-social behaviour have a higher chance of being adults with anti-social behaviour, which is likely to lead to poor job prospects, poorer relationships, they are more likely to have mental health problems, substance problems, more likely to be involved with crime…”

Craig was in the headlines around the time of the Cass Review’s release in 2024, when he pointed out the correlation between autism and gender dysphoria. He also featured in Channel 4’s 2021 documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Myths And The Menopause, about the lack of understanding and misinformation that surrounds menopause as well as its impact on women’s health. He is now itching to move onto a new topic – which he puts down to having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“Being interested in things that are directly relevant to me, I've shifted my focus,” he says. “That's my ADHD. I get bored of being in an area for too long, and I want to do something else.”

An expert in neurodevelopmental conditions, Craig gives a lecture about the biology of ADHD at King’s College University, taking his students through a case study of somebody being diagnosed, from their various school reports to questionnaires that are filled out by their parents. Then he reveals that person is himself.

“I tell them that the person's coming in at the end of the lecture to answer some questions, and then I tell them it's me, which they find very interesting, because by that point they've perceived me to be a highly functional professor giving them a talk on ADHD.”

The condition was picked up in Craig as an adult, when he was working in the first ADHD clinic for adults in the country – and failing to diagnose anybody. “I was effectively pulled to one side, and I recognised at that point that I wasn't diagnosing anybody because I thought I was normal, and that people weren't saying anything that was abnormal to me.”

The new topic of interest for his research is Alzheimer’s in women, which is again in part personally motivated, because he has a sister with the disease living in a Norwood residential home.

“I'm interested in the other end of life now, and I've got a real bee in my bonnet that I believe I've got a way of preventing Alzheimer's disease in women.”

He is currently trying to raise money to further his research in that area. But, he says, “It’s being thwarted by the fact that I'm pushing up against something that is not aligned with the current way of thinking. I have ideas about how to prevent it that are different to the current thinking. The grant I applied for I didn't get.”