In my first weeks and months as a mother, worry became a kind of ceaseless static in my mind, never not there. With the worry came guilt. And with the guilt, loneliness. I didn’t feel like the parent my son deserved or the naturally nurturing mother I had been told repeatedly I would be. The orbit of my life had shrunk to encompass little more than the chair in which I nursed my son and the room where his bassinet stood next to our bed.
Feeling overwhelmed even in that felt like failure. None of this – the all- consuming nature of it, the devastation that accompanied the joy – was how I had imagined it would be.
Close friends who had young children reassured me that the early months were hard, that things would get better when the baby started sleeping more at night, but they never talked about this thing I felt that I couldn’t quite name, a kind of untying. Neither did I. Even as the months passed and my worry began to fade a little, the sense remained that I had stepped into a disorienting new reality in which everything sat a few degrees off-centre.
In some ways, it was thrilling. I recognised a new power in myself. Other times, when I spotted someone else walking to work with the same ugly breast pump bag that I had, I would wonder, did they feel it too? Had they become familiar with the same soundtrack of what- ifs, crescendoing in absurdity? (What if that sniffle is the start of pneumonia? What if I fall down the stairs while carrying him?) Did they find themselves crying uncontrollably as they read about the capsizing of a boat full of refugees in the Mediterranean – the news not only tragic but now something visceral, an agony for somebody else’s babies?
Did they know the strange tug between the urge to run from the shower to comfort their crying child in the next room and the desire to climb out the bathroom window, so desperate for a moment to themselves, with their old selves? I feared that their answer was no. That I was an outlier, that the maternal instinct that was supposed to provide equilibrium in the tumult of new parenthood was broken. Or, worse, that something deep within me had been altered. Set loose.
Pregnancy and parenting books seemed only to gloss over the questions I now had about myself as a mother. I found an inkling of something different first in a tattered hand-me-down copy of Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development by famed paediatrician T Berry Brazelton, originally published in 1969. Brazelton wrote that many new mothers face emotional and psychological challenges, that those struggles are normal and “may even be an important part of her ability to become a different kind of person”.
Soon after, I read other people’s writing about the maternal brain and, because I am a questioner by nature and a health journalist by training, I dug into the research myself. I would think of Brazelton’s words often as I pored over studies documenting the change in the volume of grey matter in a mother’s brain or what one paper describes as the “wholesale remodelling of synapses and neural activity”. Half a century ago, Brazelton sensed what researchers today are establishing using human brain scans and animal models: parenthood creates “a different kind of person”.
Birthing a baby doesn’t simply turn on a long-dormant circuit marked for maternal instinct and specific to the brains of females. Researchers studying the neurobiology of parents have begun documenting the many ways having a child reorganises the brain, altering the neural feedback loops that dictate how we react to the world around us, how we read and respond to other people, and how we regulate our own emotions.
Becoming a parent changes our brain, functionally and structurally, in ways that shape our physical and mental health over the remainder of our life span. Scientists have found such significant change in gestational mothers, by far the most studied group, that they now recognise new motherhood as a major developmental stage of life. And they’ve begun mapping how, in all parents who engage in caring for their children, no matter their path to parenthood, the brain is changed by the intensity of that experience and the hormonal shifts that accompany it. We are, in a very real sense, remade by parenthood.
Most pregnancy books and health care providers pay lip service at least to the fact that hormone levels rise steeply during pregnancy and childbirth and plunge soon after. New parents are gently warned about the “baby blues”, a period of moodiness and mild depression that most birthing parents experience in the weeks after childbirth. But rarely do we learn what that jolt of hormones sets in motion. This hormonal surge acts like a rush order on the remodelling of the brain, sensitising it for the creation of new neural pathways aimed first at motivating parents – despite self- doubt or lack of experience – to meet baby’s basic needs in those tenuous first days, and then setting them up for a longer period of learning how to care for their child.
Babies change like the weather and then grow, before we know it, into walking, talking beings with complex physical and emotional needs. Parents need to be able to change with them. The brain adjusts in ways that account for that, becoming more moldable, more adaptable than it typically is.
Using brain imaging technology and other tools, scientists can clearly detect and measure changes in the physical structure of new mothers’ brains. They’ve found that regions key to the work of parenting, including those that shape our motivation, attention, and social responses, change significantly in volume, especially through pregnancy and the first few months with a newborn, in a process thought to represent a fine- tuning of the brain for the demands of parenting.
Researchers have identified a general pattern of activity across birthing parents’ brains that builds over time, a caregiving circuitry that is activated as they listen to recordings of their baby’s cry, for example, or respond to images or videos of their child smiling or in distress. The imprint of that circuitry is present even when a mother is doing nothing in particular, lying in an MRI scanner and letting her mind wander.
Caring for a baby changes what researchers call the functional architecture of the brain, the framework across which brain activity moves. And remarkably, those changes last, not only weeks or months after a baby is born but perhaps even decades later, over a person’s whole life span.
Taken together, the science suggests that remodelling of the parental brain involves much more than rearranging furniture to make room for one more role in a busy life. Becoming a parent moves weight-bearing walls. It tweaks the floor plan. It changes the way light enters the space.
As I learned more, my worries seemed to quiet a little. Having a baby changes the brain. Not only for the one in five birthing parents who develop a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder, but for all of them. I had felt adrift in new motherhood, and this anchored me. The turmoil I felt might be normal, an intrinsic part of the reorientation of the brain for parenthood.
The story I found in the science was decidedly not one of a woman girded by the magic of motherly love, who responds to her baby’s every need reflexively, accepts the self-sacrifice required of her without question, and taps into a well of mother-knows-best wisdom. That narrative, it had become clear to me, was about as representative of new motherhood as the someday-your-prince-will-come Disney stories are of dating and marriage.
Instead, the science tells us that to become a parent is to be deluged. We are overwhelmed with stimuli, from our changed bodies and our changed routines. From the hormonal fluxes of pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding. From our babies, of course. It is brutal, in a sense, how completely engulfed we are by it and from multiple fronts, like a rock at the ocean’s edge, battered by waves and tides and sun and wind.
All the new input our brain must take in, suddenly and all at once, may feel disorienting and distressing. But it has a point. This flood of stimuli compels us to care for infants in their most vulnerable state, because a parent’s love is neither automatic nor absolute. In a sense, the brain works to keep our babies alive until the heart catches up. It transforms us into protective, even obsessive caregivers when so many of us lack any skill whatsoever in actual child-rearing.
If that were all, the parental brain would be worthy of awe. That’s just the start. Scientists have begun tracking how the neural reorganisation caused by parenthood affects a person’s behaviour, their way of being in the world, their life at large. This work is just beginning. But the findings so far and the questions they point to are deeply meaningful in themselves. For me, studying them has been like seeing my own reflection in a storefront window along a bustling sidewalk — a chance to recognise myself.
Researchers studying women have found that new motherhood seems to alter how they read and respond to social and emotional cues, not only from their babies but perhaps also from their partners and other adults. It may change their ability to regulate their own emotions, helping them to stay calm — in a relative sense — in the face of a screaming infant (or a stubborn preschooler or a moody teenager), and to plan a response.
While many people experience real but generally temporary memory loss during pregnancy and the postpartum period, motherhood in certain contexts also has been found to enhance executive functioning, affecting a person’s ability to strategise and her capacity to shift attention between tasks. Though the results are somewhat complicated to date, a small number of studies suggest motherhood may even protect cognition later in life.
Parenthood has been neglected by science, seen more as a subject of morality and the soft laws of nature than as one worthy of rigorous investigation. For a long time, beyond pregnancy and the act of breastfeeding, human maternal behaviour was thought to be determined wholly by social and individual factors, with little physiological basis. But parenthood is all those things, psychosocial and neurobiological, a change in lifestyle and a change in self.
It has become clear to me that the parental brain is an essential topic not only for people taking prenatal classes or navigating the first weeks at home with a newborn. It’s one that grandparents and policy makers, health care providers and advocates, any working parent and any manager of working parents should understand, too, along with any person who is considering whether to become a parent and looking for information, beyond mythology, to help them decide.
This science can play a role in shifting gender norms at home and at work, in building public policies that actually support parents of young children, in securing reproductive rights, and in reimagining the relationship between parenting and society. At the very least, it alters the stories we tell ourselves about our individual experiences of parenthood and about the world around us.
This science has exposed something essential that is so obviously missing from the old story of maternal instinct: time. Becoming a mother, a parent, is a process. Unless we’ve previously done the intensive work of wholly caring for another vulnerable person, our fundamental capacity for parenting is not preexisting. It grows.
That growth can be painful and powerful. And long- lasting. All sorts of factors determine just how it will occur. How would our expectations change – the ones we hold ourselves to, the ones we judge others by – if we could see that fundamental truth?
‘Mother Brain: Separating Myth from Biology – the Science of the Parental Brain’ by Chelsea Conaboy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) is out now
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