Your brain on parenthood
New parenthood is a distinct developmental stage. What does that mean in the context of the brain you've already got? (We've got some questions.)
Mother Brain got a lot of rejections before it got a book deal. During the weeks my amazing agent, Melissa Danaczko, was shopping the proposal, I constantly refreshed my inbox and despaired at the responses—pass, pass, pass.
Writing a book is hard. Writing and selling a proposal is painful.
While we waited for more publishers to weigh in and then for a finalized deal with Henry Holt & Co., Melissa encouraged me to keep working on the proposal, incorporating feedback from the rejections. I did, and it made the proposal stronger. Holt used the updated version when selling foreign rights. Now Mother Brain, incredibly, is set to be published in 20 countries.
But there was one piece of feedback I couldn’t fully reconcile in that reworked proposal: This science is young. “Too early-stage,” as one editor put it, to make for an engaging, full-length book. She was right, in part.
The science of the parental brain, in humans at least, is early-stage. The neuroscience of parenthood has been neglected as a topic worth researching. Plus, studying pregnant people and other parents is hard to do, so progress has been slow, but it is picking up. Still, there are many more questions than answers.
The things is—and this is the very thing I hope does make Mother Brain an engaging book—those questions themselves are powerful. This science presents a whole bunch of paradigm-shifting ones, which we only know to ask because of the work that parental brain researchers have done to date.
Despite what the century-old myth masquerading as science suggests, caregiving isn’t built into us as a maternal instinct. It is not a rigid pattern of behavior that switches on automatically once we hold our baby for the first time.
Rather, our brains adapt to parenthood through a profound and often grueling period of development, during which we grow our ability to read and respond to our children’s social cues in a flexible way. That capacity develops from the brains we bring to the role—brains that have been shaped by our genetics and by all our lived experience up until that point and onward. What does that mean?
At book events and in interviews, I field lots of interesting questions about how these changes might differ according to our individual contexts, according to the brains we start with. Many of them I can’t answer. Some examples (and many more here):
What about someone who already has spent a lot of time taking care of kids? Is this upheaval less dramatic if you’ve worked for years as a nanny or as an early childhood educator, or you took care of younger siblings? Research has indicated that a sense of ownness matters—the brain seems to attune to your own child’s needs. But what does that mean? Could your brain attune to the needs of the children in your care, the babies you are directly, intensely, and repeatedly responsible for, and be changed by them? Maybe.
How does prior pregnancy loss affect the parental brain? In the early postpartum period, the brain changes in ways that drive us to be hyper-responsive to our babies, with increased activity in brain regions involved in motivation and vigilance. How might the specific and common trauma of pregnancy loss affect how a person experiences that hyper-responsiveness, or how it develops in them? We don’t really know.
What about neurodivergence? If a parent is autistic or has ADHD, do these changes look or feel different? The science doesn’t say. And, until very recently, the experiences of autistic adults have been dramatically understudied. The neurobiology of parenthood has been, too. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
Sometimes science offers answers. Sometimes it offers better questions. In the context of something like parenting—experienced by most adults but with incredible variation from person to person—that may be just what we need, more than any hard and fast conclusion. Questions that can help us know ourselves better.
Do you have questions about the parental brain science, even obviously unanswered/unanswerable ones? Share them below. I’ll tell you what, if anything, the science has to say. And the question itself might just help someone.
On not being “nurturing” enough:
offers great advice to the producers of Love Is Blind on asking better questions of contestants, rather than perpetuating the idea that all women become mothers and must demonstrate their maternal aptitude in order to be crowned a good wife:More work, less play: An increasing percentage of straight women are earning more than their husbands, but they’re still doing more child care and housework and getting less leisure time. That’s the takeaway from a new Pew Research Center report. It’s worth reading the full report.
An embarrassment of riches: There are so many books coming this spring that I’m excited about. Don’t miss this profile of
, whose Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture is out on Tuesday, which means you can still preorder your signed copy here. The comments on that piece are outrageous and hard to read, but they demonstrate so very clearly why we need Virginia’s work.And, check out this excerpt from
's book, Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, also out Tuesday. I read an early copy and loved it. You can preorder a signed copy here. I mean:I know now that my mom’s performance was never for us, because I know that the performance is never for my kids, even when I pretend that it is. They’re kids, after all, and by nature completely self-obsessed. I only exist as a background to the foreground of their own experiences. The performance is for me. It is for us, who were trained to perform for the male gaze and whose primary value as sex objects no longer holds so much currency. We perform mothering online as a way of accessing meaning when, most days, the work of motherhood doesn’t seem to mean much of anything according to the many men legislating against paid family leave, universal preschool, and childcare subsidies.
We perform motherhood for ourselves. We mother for others.
Whose ‘mommy brain’?: I wrote two weeks ago about why we need to retire this phrase. I really appreciate this comment, by
, who writes :I am a trans man who gave birth two months ago and who is currently nursing. Very occasionally, I have cognitive lapses that generally seem pretty clearly due to sleep loss or existential overwhelm. It had never occurred to me (or anyone else) to label these lapses as "mommy brain"--and I think the fact that there is no gender-neutral equivalent reveals the underlying sexism here.
Mother Brain winners: Thanks to all who entered the Mother’s Day giveaway of Mother Brain, and congrats to the five winners! The books go in the mail on Monday.
A can’t-miss event: This dream event hosted by WBUR’s Cognoscenti, keeps getting better. I’ll be there with Kate Baer, Angela Garbes, Sara Petersen, and now comedian Bethany Van Delft. Please come!
Me and Jochebed: On May 16, my friend and former colleague Peggy Grodinsky and I will talk Mother Brain at the Portland Museum of Art, for a Maine Voices Live event. I’m excited about this one. Those who have read Mother Brain will know that this place was important to me in reimagining my own motherhood. The book ends here, with this statue of Moses’s mother.
Related to “prior caregiving experience” I also wonder about how the broad category of “history of emotional caretaking or codependency” plays into the experience. For me, yes, I had a LOT more direct infant and child care experience than my male partner; but, it often feels like the way my brain searches for and responses to needs in the family is more related to how I have been socialized to caretake in public spaces and my hypersensitivity/vigilance from growing up with an active addict than knowing more about infant sleep. Especially with the lens of parenting as development stage, it would seem at least experiences that led to codependency would have an impact.
Thanks for the mention!
I started reading your book yesterday (the way I read most books these days -- on my phone, while nursing) and I'm looking forward to more.
Does the neuroscience tell us anything about how parenthood reshapes our ability to experience pleasure and satisfaction? I am leaving these categories broad--so could be anything from sexual pleasure to the satisfaction of completing a project.