Grandparents play a critical role in child rearing across the globe. Yet, there is a shortage of neurobiological research examining the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren. We employ multi-brain neurocomputational models to simulate how changes in neurophysiological processes in both development and healthy aging affect multigenerational inter-brain coupling – a neural marker that has been linked to a range of socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes. The simulations suggest that grandparent-child interactions may be paired with higher inter-brain coupling than parent-child interactions, raising the possibility that the former may be more advantageous under certain conditions. Critically, this enhancement of inter-brain coupling for grandparent-child interactions is more pronounced in tri-generational interactions that also include a parent, which may speak to findings that grandparent involvement in childrearing is most beneficial if the parent is also an active household member. Together, these findings underscore that a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of cross-generational interactions is vital, and that such knowledge can be helpful in guiding interventions that consider the whole family. We advocate for a community neuroscience approach in developmental social neuroscience to capture the diversity of child-caregiver relationships in real-world settings.

祖父母在全球儿童抚养中发挥着至关重要的作用。然而，缺乏对祖父母与孙子女之间关系的神经生物学研究。我们采用多脑神经计算模型来模拟发育和健康衰老过程中神经生理过程的变化如何影响多代脑间耦合——一种与一系列社会情感和认知结果相关的神经标记。模拟表明，祖父母与孩子的互动可能比亲子互动具有更高的脑间耦合，这提高了祖父母与孩子的互动在某些条件下可能更有利的可能性。至关重要的是，祖父母与子女互动的脑间耦合的增强在也包括父母的三代互动中更为明显，这可能说明如果父母也是活跃的家庭成员，祖父母参与育儿是最有益的。 。总之，这些发现强调，更好地理解跨代互动的神经生物学基础至关重要，并且这些知识有助于指导考虑整个家庭的干预措施。我们提倡在发展社会神经科学中采用社区神经科学方法，以捕捉现实世界中儿童与照顾者关系的多样性。