2023-09-16 21:15:00
The “maternal”—or rather, the parental—brain really does exist! Much evidence of this fact can be found in the book by neuroscientist Chelsea Conaboy, “Parental Intuition,” published by Mann, Ivanov and Ferber. We are publishing an excerpt regarding how parenthood affects our emotions and cognitive functions.
The birth of a child does not simply trigger a long-dormant process associated with the maternal instinct and inherent exclusively in the female brain. Researchers in parental neuroscience have begun to note a variety of ways that having a baby reorganizes the brain, changing the neural feedback loops that determine how we respond to the world around us, how we perceive and respond to other people, and how we control our own emotions. Becoming a parent changes our brains—functionally and structurally—in ways that impact our physical and mental health for the rest of our lives.
Scientists have found such significant changes in mothers who carried their pregnancies to term—the best-studied group to date—that they now recognize motherhood as the most important developmental milestone in the entire lifespan. They also began to notice how all parents involved in caring for their children, regardless of the personal circumstances of parenting, had brains that changed in response to the intensity of that experience and the accompanying hormonal shifts.
Parenthood is literally reshaping us.
The authors of most books on pregnancy and health officials at least acknowledge the fact that hormone levels rise sharply during pregnancy and childbirth and decline shortly following these events. New mothers are being discharged from hospitals with leaflets that gently warn regarding postpartum depression – a period of blues and depression that most new mothers go through in the first weeks following the birth of a child. However, we are unlikely to know what exactly this portion of hormones triggers.
The hormonal surge associated with pregnancy and childbirth creates an urgent order to rewire the brain: increasing its sensitivity to create new neural pathways aimed at motivating parents, despite their self-doubts or lack of experience. This is necessary to meet the basic needs of the child in his difficult first days of life, and then to prepare parents for the long period of learning how to care for their offspring. Children change as quickly as the weather, and then, unnoticed by us, they turn into creatures capable of walking and talking, with a whole range of physical and emotional needs. Parents must change with them. The brain, whose capabilities are designed for such changes, becomes more plastic, more adaptive than usual – perhaps even more than at any other time in adult life.
The physiological changes are dramatic. Using brain imaging technologies and other tools, scientists can clearly identify and measure new phenomena in the organic structure of a new mother’s brain. They found that the areas responsible for parenting, including those responsible for our motivation, attention and social behavior, change markedly in size. These are complex structural changes. Individual areas grow or shrink as the brain responds to the rapidly changing circumstances of life as a new parent, especially during pregnancy and the first few months with a newborn.
This process is thought to be the brain’s adaptation to the demands of parenthood.
Researchers have identified a general pattern of parental brain activity that develops over time: a network of interneural connections that are responsible for nurturing and are activated when parents listen, for example, to a recording of their child crying or react to a photo or video of their child smiling or sad. A trace of this neural network is present even when the mother is doing nothing special, lying in the MRI scanner and letting her thoughts wander. Caring for a child influences what researchers call the functional architecture of the brain—the structure within which brain activity occurs.
It is noteworthy that these changes last not only weeks or months following birth, but also, perhaps, decades later, throughout a person’s entire life – much longer than the period that we perceive as our child’s childhood years.
Overall, science suggests that rewiring the parent’s brain is much more than simply “rearranging the furniture” to make room for yet another role in a busy life.
Parenthood moves load-bearing walls. Improves the entire layout. Affects how light falls in the room. As I delved deeper into the question, my anxiety gradually subsided. Having a baby changes the brain. Not just one in five new mothers who suffer from postpartum depression or anxiety disorder, but all of them. All mothers. I felt like I had been swept out into the open sea of motherhood, and this information became an anchor for me. The confusion I felt may be normal, part and parcel of the brain reorientation required to be a parent. This raised a lot of new questions: what else was I missing? How exactly does the brain change and how can it affect my life? And also: why didn’t I know regarding this before?
The story that science told me was definitely not regarding a woman endowed with the magical power of maternal love, thanks to which this woman reflexively responds to her child’s every need, unquestioningly accepts her sacrificial position and taps into the source of wisdom from the category of “mothers know best.” This vision, it suddenly became clear to me, had as much to do with motherhood as “one day you will meet your prince” in Disney fairy tales had to do with dating and marriage.
On the contrary, science says that becoming a parent means being caught in an avalanche.
We are overloaded with all sorts of stimuli that come from a changing body and a changing lifestyle; from hormonal surges during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding; from our children with their milky smell, tiny fingers, humming and incessant needs. In fact, it is simply cruel to be so absorbed in all this, overcome on all fronts, like a rock on the ocean shore, exposed to the waves, and the current, and the sun, and the wind. Some researchers call this environmental difficulties of parenting. All the new incoming information that the brain must take in—suddenly and all at once—can be disorienting and stressful. But it makes sense.
This stream of stimuli forces us to care for a child who is in the most vulnerable state, since parental love is neither automatic nor unconditional.
It turns out that the brain works to support the life of a newborn until our heart joins the process. The brain turns us into anxious, even obsessive caregivers, while many of us have no childcare skills. Even if it all ended there, the parental brain would already be worthy of admiration. But this is just the beginning.
Scientists have begun to track how the neural restructuring caused by the birth of a child affects a person’s behavior, his way of being in the world, his life in general. Ask any researcher what science knows today, and they will probably answer: “Almost nothing.”
Work in this direction is just beginning
However, the discoveries that have already been made up to this point, and the questions that arise in connection with them, are very significant in themselves. For me, exploring this topic was like watching my reflection in a store window that faces a crowded sidewalk—I saw an opportunity to recognize myself.
Researchers studying women have found that new mothers perceive and respond to social and emotional cues differently, not just with their children, but also with their partners and other adults. Their ability to manage their own emotions changes, helping them to remain calm—to some degree—in the presence of a screaming child (or stubborn preschooler, or disgruntled teenager) so they can plan their next course of action. Although most women experience genuine—but temporary—memory decline during pregnancy and postpartum, in certain situations motherhood has been recognized as a condition that promotes goal-directed behavior regulation, affecting a woman’s ability to plan and shift attention between tasks.
Although research to date is mixed, a small number of studies suggest that motherhood may improve cognitive function later in life.
The questions at the forefront of this field are urgent and, however puzzling, basic. Science has neglected the topic of parenthood, treating it more as a moral subject and a soft law of nature than as an issue worthy of careful study. It has long been believed that human maternal behavior—beyond pregnancy and breastfeeding—is determined entirely by social and individual factors, with little contribution from physiology. Meanwhile, parenting includes all this: psychology and neurobiology, changes in lifestyle and in oneself.
Today, leading researchers in the field—notably, most of them women—recognize this and are striving to find answers that might lead to far-reaching results. Why do changes in the brain designed to make parents motivated caregivers also make them vulnerable enough to prevent them from achieving that same goal? How does an individual’s reproductive history, even one without children, affect their long-term health?
How do brain-changing addictions interact with brain-changing parenting?
Do the brain changes that accompany pregnancy affect the effectiveness of antidepressants in the postpartum period? How does trauma, in all its forms, including the extremely common miscarriages and birth injuries, impact postpartum and future mental health? Mom Brain: Jokes aside, what really happens to a woman’s cognitive function when she has a baby? How are things going with her creative abilities and emotional state? How does childbearing affect her life beyond her ability to be a parent?
I realized that the topic of the parental brain is significant not only in childbirth preparation courses or in the first weeks following the birth of the baby, when mother and child are settling in at home. This is a topic that should be understood by grandparents, government officials, health care professionals, lawyers, all working parents and their managers, as well as anyone who is wondering whether they want to be a parent and is looking for sources of information (beyond myths) that would help him make a decision. This science can influence how the roles of men and women are distributed at home and at work, the protection of reproductive rights, and the rethinking of the relationship between parenthood and life in society. At the very least, we will talk differently regarding our own parenting experiences and regarding the world around us. These stories are desperately waiting to be rewritten. Stories regarding the spiritual world of the mother thrush or regarding my helplessness.
Science is revealing something important – something that is clearly missing from the old fairy tale regarding maternal instinct: the category of time. Becoming a mother, a parent, is a process. If we have never had the opportunity to take on the full responsibility of caring for another vulnerable person before, being a parent is not predetermined. She is growing. This growth can be painful and rapid.
And it can last a long time. How this will happen is influenced by many different factors.
Illustration: Igor Levin / Shutterstock / Fotodom
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#placenta #brain #Neuroscientist #parenting #affects #minds
