Researchers: Parents should combine words with gestures to help their children learn

New study shows that parents and children who use speech and gesture have sustained and synced brain wave activity

Thursday, September 10, 2026

As children return to school, new research from the University of Iowa shows how parents can help their kids learn while literally being on the same wavelength.

In a new study, neuroscientists found that adults who use speech and hand gestures when interacting with their child achieve "neural synchrony," where brain waves in the parent match their child's. Ece Demir-Lira, associate professor in the UI Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the study's corresponding author, says combining words with hand gestures can be applied by parents and teachers alike.

"We find it's not how much time a parent is with their child, it's more about the nature of the interaction," Demir-Lira says. "Those interactions can be even richer if the parent provides additional cues to their children via speech and gesture or encourages their kids to gesture with their hands, too."

Demir-Lira and graduate student Ying Li wanted to understand how parents help young children solve problems. The researchers especially were interested in whether a particular level of engagement - which they call scaffolding - was best to help kids learn. Previous research has indicated kids learn best when instructions include speech and gestures, but those studies didn't include parents and children working together or monitor in real time what was happening in their brains.

In their study, Demir-Lira and Li found that when the parent added gestures to their verbal instructions, blood flow rose in the adult brain's perception area - the region that senses another's success or struggle - and simultaneously in the problem-solving area of the child's brain.

"The same brain wave in the parent and child goes up and down in synchrony together, like two dancers dancing," Demir-Lira says.

The researchers found that adults who relied only on speech to guide their child with solving a puzzle showed a corresponding rise in brain activity at the beginning, but that connection weakened as the task progressed before rebounding toward the end. Demir-Lira interprets this as an initial burst of connectivity as the two attempt to complete the puzzle, followed by a period when the child loses focus, and ending with another attempt by the parent to help the child complete the puzzle.

Parents who gave no verbal or physical instructions had the lowest linked brain activity with their child, the researchers report.

Demir-Lira recreates her study into parent-child learning with her fourth-grade daughter, Sophia Lira. During the study, a parent and a child were asked to complete variations of a seven-piece puzzle. The only instructions they were given was the shape to make with the puzzle pieces, such as a bird or a house. Researchers monitored their brain wave activity and found they were most synced when the parent combined speech and gestures.

While not directly addressed in this study, the researchers believe parents who used speech and gesture were more successful in guiding their child in puzzle solving because they could accentuate a vocal cue by pointing to a puzzle piece or showing how two puzzle pieces go together.

"We think speech and gesture divide the information; they complement each other. Gesture implies spatial relations, which speech is not as good at accomplishing," Demir-Lira says.

She has seen this when helping her 9-year-old daughter with math problems. For example, when Demir-Lira combines oral instructions with gestures to highlight both sides of a math equation, she says her daughter seems to more easily grasp the material.

"It's about being more efficient at packaging the information, so the child can understand it more easily," she says.

The study is titled "Parental speech and gesture scaffolding moderate the neural dynamics of parent-child synchrony." It was published online on June 26 in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Li is the study's first author.

The National Institutes of Health, through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program, funded the research. Li's involvement was funded by an NIH Predoctoral Training Grant.