Part of your job as a parent is to teach your children, and there is no way for a child to learn anything without making a few mistakes. In fact, there are a lot of mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes can be infuriating. They can be self-destructive mistakes. These may be mistakes that can cause harm to their brothers, sisters or classmates. These can be mistakes that are repeated over and over again. These may be bugs that seem deliberately created in order to push your buttons. Part of being a good parent is getting the point across without being overly critical. It looks like grumpy Nancy may have an adverse effect on your child's brain. Two experiments confirm this: during one study conducted in Binghamton, New York, researchers observed parents talking to their teenage children. Scientists evaluated parents by the level of criticism. The researchers then measured the brain activity of the children as they viewed a series of photographs of faces showing different emotions. In children of very critical parents, when viewing emotional pictures, vast areas of the brain were deactivated. The findings of this study are that criticism can be so emotionally painful and possibly destructive because it shuts down large parts of the brain. During another study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015, teenage volunteers underwent functional MRI (fMRI is a special magnetic resonance image that measures the activity of various brain regions) while listening to their mothers' voices. Teenagers underwent MRI three times; once when they heard their mothers praise them, the second time when they were harshly criticized, and finally when they were talked to on an emotionally neutral topic.