S3 E3: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood with Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain

[00:00:00] Maternal Instinct is not grounded in science. It's grounded in the moral and religious ideas of what a mother and a woman is that were really written into evolutionary theory and into instinct theory

[00:00:17] in the late 19th and early 20th century. Welcome to season three of The Story of Woman. I'm your host, Anna Stoecklein. From the intricacies of the economy and healthcare to the nuances of workplace bias and gender roles, each episode of this season features interviews

[00:00:44] with thought leaders who provide fresh perspectives on critical global issues, all through the female gaze. But this podcast isn't just about women's stories. It's about rewriting our collective story to be more inclusive, equitable, and effective in driving change. It's about

[00:01:01] changing the current story of mankind to the much more complete story of humankind. Hello, hello. Welcome back and thank you so much for being here. So for today's episode, we've got a guest host taking over. I tried this out last season with producer, writer,

[00:01:34] and storyteller, Asha Daya, who hosted the final two episodes of that season. And I wanted to keep that going because among several reasons women are not monoliths. So the more perspectives that we include in woman's story, the better. So I have ideas of continuing to

[00:01:51] expand the podcast to include the voices of women who know much more than me about certain topics or who come from different backgrounds and lived experiences. So this is kind of the beginning

[00:02:01] stages of that idea coming to life. As always, please let me know what you think and get in touch if you have any ideas on this or if you'd like to be considered to be a guest host

[00:02:12] yourself. Today's guest host is, today's guest host is Monica Cardenas. Monica is a London based American writer and scholar. She holds a master's and PhD in English and creative writing from Royal Holloway University of London. Her research is focused on the non-maternal woman in 20th century

[00:02:31] literature alongside the evolution of reproductive rights in the United States. She's worked as a fiction reader for an online literary magazine and has taught creative writing at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her work's been featured in a variety of

[00:02:44] publications and she has a book review blog where she engages with novels featuring non-maternal women and this is why I thought she'd be a great person to speak with Chelsea Connoboy about her book Mother Brain, how neuroscience is rewriting the story of parenthood. But I'll let Monica

[00:03:03] tell you a bit more about Chelsea and what they get into during their conversation. I hope you enjoy. Chelsea Connoboy is a health and science journalist based in Maine. Mother Brain is her first book published last year and now out in paperback. She's written for the Concord Monitor,

[00:03:21] Philadelphia Enquirer, Portland Press Herald and The Boston Globe, part of the team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, Mother Jones, Politico and many other publications.

[00:03:37] It was such a pleasure to speak to Chelsea about how parents and mothers brains change, how her research fits into the reproductive rights debate in the United States, and whether the so-called maternal instinct is a real thing.

[00:03:59] All right well thank you again Chelsea. I'm so glad I got to speak to you about this book. I was thrilled when I saw it come out because it's something that I have been interested in

[00:04:09] for a long time and the reason I asked Anna if I could speak to you about this book in particular was that some of my doctoral research is loosely connected to this idea of an inherent

[00:04:25] maternal instinct whether it exists or not. And so I think the first question is what to you is Mother Brain? Where did this title of the book come from? Yeah so the title of the book really came from I guess my own effort to try to understand

[00:04:43] what was happening to my brain after my first son was born in 2015. I felt really overwhelmed with worry and not only like worried about his well-being or breastfeeding or like my capacity

[00:05:00] to care for him but also really like worried about the worry itself and feeling like it was a sign that something was kind of missing or broken in me as far as like the certainty

[00:05:12] or overwhelming warmth that I had anticipated feeling in new motherhood and I'm a journalist and information is very much my way of coping with things and so I went on a deep dive into the

[00:05:27] maternal brain research specifically and found there just a story that I felt like hadn't been told about the neurobiological changes that we go through as we make this really massive transition in our lives with profound hormonal changes but also experiential changes and

[00:05:51] lifestyle changes and our whole social context is changed. So in 2018 I wrote a story for the Boston Globe magazine about the maternal brain research specifically and my own experience with new motherhood and that story really went viral and I had already been thinking about writing a

[00:06:11] book but then I realized like oh this thing that has been helpful to me can help a lot of other people too so I eventually got the book deal and the more I read about this research the more

[00:06:25] I realized that it wasn't just a story for gestational parents it really was a story for all parents and so the book is called Mother Brain how neuroscience is rewriting the story of

[00:06:35] parenthood. It's really a book in my mind for everyone who's doing this work or who cares about people who are doing this work of caregiving but we call that mother brain because

[00:06:46] so much of what I see as like the need in our society is like really reframing what a mother is so that everyone all parents can like benefit from this more generous narrative.

[00:07:02] Yeah I think definitely accomplishes that one of the first things I thought when I saw the title was sort of a wink toward mommy brain or what people call mommy brain which I think is

[00:07:16] usually insulting used in an insulting way that your memory isn't working as it should or you're forgetful and is that something that you thought about? Absolutely yes there was definitely like that element of like no this is like something of sophistication I guess like

[00:07:35] mommy brain is such a harmful trope in my mind that like we are compromised by this time of life and we can get into the details of that if you want like memory deficits are real but they're

[00:07:48] also like one temporary and small part of a much more complicated story about how we grow in this stage of life and so yeah definitely there was a wink towards like this is not mommy

[00:08:00] brain it's mother brain and also you know there's an element of that and just the cover design too like I really didn't want it to look like something that you would find in the baby isle you know

[00:08:14] because I wanted I knew that people who were looking for that that audience would find it anyway and I wanted it to feel like this is a science book that says something to an audience

[00:08:28] that's much bigger than just expected parents right as you said the subtitle is how neuroscience is rewriting the story of parenthood so what do you think the narrative was how would you define the narrative before your research yeah how did we think about mothers and parenthood

[00:08:47] so I think there are many different ways that we think about mothers and parenthood but one really dominant one in my mind is this idea of maternal instinct I ended up really focusing on that

[00:08:59] because one of the questions that I asked with that original 2018 article that I wrote was why aren't we talking about this more like why isn't this science already part of perinatal care and in parenting books and part of the conversation that we have

[00:09:17] with our care providers when we're pregnant during those many appointments we go to like why isn't this conveyed to us and I think there's a couple of reasons for that one is that the science is

[00:09:29] relatively new although we know enough in my mind to start the conversation obviously but the other piece is that I think this science tells a really compelling story the problem is we've had this

[00:09:42] other story we've had this other story of maternal instinct that is so deeply ingrained in our society that it's hard to get past and I started looking at maternal instinct and it felt very

[00:09:58] like just something we take as fact and the way I define it is you know this idea that the capacity for caregiving is innate and automatic and distinctly female and also that

[00:10:12] that idea is grounded in science and so I started tracing that idea back and lots of feminist scholars have written about this in the past and so you know I was able to look at their work and see

[00:10:26] that maternal instinct is not grounded in science it's grounded in the moral and religious ideas of what a mother and a woman is that were really written into evolutionary theory and into instinct theory in the late 19th and early 20th century and then carried forward and sort of

[00:10:50] repeated over and over again and in new ways with each generation until in the book I describe it as like a classic case of disinformation it's something that has the plausibility of truth because

[00:11:04] we feel changed by parenthood and we see those changes in other people and it just gets repeated again and again until we kind of believe it reflexively so I think that's the story that

[00:11:16] I was kind of writing against in this book. Yeah and I think we see it repeated so much in culture it's everywhere you look it's just taken for granted I think until you start to pick it apart

[00:11:30] and it's true I agree I mean based on my own research feminist scholars have been saying this for generations but I don't think there's a lot of scientific backing to some of those statements

[00:11:46] in the way that you've laid out in your book with scientific evidence proving that men's and women's brains are different or women are just hardwired for it in that way so can you talk

[00:12:00] maybe about what it is that you found that disproves this maternal instinct? Yes so I guess starting with the idea that it's like innate or automatic the science of the parental brain is really shows

[00:12:15] that there are two things that shape the parental brain one of them is hormonal changes you know we talk a lot about the hormonal changes of pregnancy and how how those hormones allow a fetus to

[00:12:27] grow and initiate the progression of the pregnancy and then labor and delivery and breastfeeding we really don't talk very much about what those hormones mean for the brain and what this research shows is that it's they're kind of priming the brain to be really plastic or changeable

[00:12:45] really highly moldable and ready essentially to receive the stimuli that a baby provides and the second thing that changes the brain is experience it's really a matter of time and practice of caregiving a couple of the researchers who I quote in the book talk a lot about how

[00:13:07] parenting is like ultimately a learning process that's what this research shows it is something that is learned and it's learned at a time when our brain is really ready and like prepared to learn by the physiological changes we go through so in that sense like it isn't

[00:13:24] automatic it is something that we develop this is considered like by some researchers a distinct developmental stage for the brain it's not like there's this Lego piece that clicks on that is

[00:13:34] our like maternal instinct that that like we just know what to do it is something that we need practice in it is bidirectional meaning it's shaped as much by our baby and their own genes

[00:13:48] and temperament and sense of agency as it is by ourselves and it's something that needs time to unfold you know it's the process I just want to make sure I understand so the hormonal

[00:14:02] changes help prepare your brain get it ready to receive all this information and learn this entirely new job and lifestyle and everything that is different with having a child what about I

[00:14:20] know you spend a lot of time in the book explaining that this can apply to people who aren't actually birthing the child yeah yes so that's the next thing I was going to say this idea that like

[00:14:32] this capacity for caregiving is inherently female or specific to gestational mothers the science is also proving that to be untrue in the sense that overwhelmingly the research that we have on the parental brain is in gestational mothers because the same narratives

[00:14:51] that we have as a society get repeated over and over again in our science also but that is beginning to change there is a growing body of research in fathers and to some degree much smaller degree

[00:15:04] but growing in adoptive and foster parents and what we see in them is that they also experience these same two factors hormonal changes and experience so fathers see shifts in their hormonal systems as they approach fatherhood and during early fatherhood including changes in testosterone

[00:15:25] and prolactin which we often think of as a milk making hormone but it's really about bonding and they experience similar spikes in oxytocin when they're interacting with their newborns that mothers do and there are changes both in function and structure over time in father's

[00:15:44] brains and since my book has been published there was a really significant study that came out that looked at the MRI images of father's brains during their partner's pregnancies and then after their partner's pregnancy so in that shift from before their baby's born to after and they found

[00:16:03] significant structural changes specifically across areas of the brain that are involved in social cognition or how we read and respond to another person's emotions and mental states and that's very similar to what some of the same researchers have found in mothers from before pregnancy to

[00:16:23] afterward there are these shifts in social cognition so we're just finding that there are you know I want to be careful here to say like pregnancy is a very powerful force you know I'm not saying that gestational parents and other parents go through exactly the same changes

[00:16:43] like it's undeniable the intensity of pregnancy but the mechanisms may be different but for parents who are very engaged and taking like responsibility for their care of their children the outcomes

[00:16:57] are quite similar kind of no matter how you get there I don't have children but it seems to me that any parent who reads your book or understands the concepts here that you're describing it would

[00:17:12] first of all probably relieve a lot of the pressure that a new parent would feel about just knowing what to do and hopefully be kinder to themselves as they're learning but also give

[00:17:25] the father or an adoptive parent or a parent who maybe didn't carry the child a stake an equal stake in the parenting and not feel sort of sidelined by not being the one who is pregnant

[00:17:41] I really hope that both of those things are true so certainly I think that that's what this research did for me both me personally and then relationship with my husband was you know it I felt all that worry in new parenthood that I wasn't feeling

[00:17:57] things as I was supposed to be feeling and that that lack of like a specific kind of maternal emotion meant that I was a bad mother and already you know from the start and in reality

[00:18:11] this is a process that unfolds differently from individual to individual and takes time and you know we didn't talk about this yet but the changes that happen in gestational parents in the early months are really directed towards driving our attention towards our children and

[00:18:33] some of the changes overlap a lot with anxiety and worry and so I was able to look at the science and say I'm not broken I need support but also things are happening just as they should

[00:18:46] in many ways that I am going through this process of change that's going to shape me into the parent that my child needs me to be and so I hope that that message does give people a lot of like

[00:18:56] patience and grace for themselves to just get the support they need and also go easy on themselves and their expectations and then also yes absolutely I think there's a lot of

[00:19:08] pressure for mothers to do it all and also a lot of unhelpful social narratives around the role of fathers and other parents in those early months this idea that like well babies only need their

[00:19:22] mothers and so you know there's just not like not much we can do and that's just not true babies can connect with other loving attentive caregivers and not only that but that connection is really important for those parents themselves because they need the exposure to their babies

[00:19:40] just like the gestational parent does in order to do the work of learning how to understand their cues and their mental states you know babies are these tiny vulnerable nonverbal creatures who depend on us to know what their needs are even when we don't yet always have

[00:20:00] the language to understand what those needs are and you learn them by practicing and making mistakes and trying again and fathers and other parents you know they need that time to learn as well

[00:20:13] and this is a big message I think in relation to parental leave and the need for all parents to have time with their newborns because they need that exposure to have kind of the healthiest

[00:20:26] possible transition to parenthood that they can you wrote an op-ed in the New York Times when your book was published about how maternal instinct is a myth that men created and how that myth has

[00:20:42] been perpetuated and we talked a little bit about that how is what we have historically called maternal instinct different from what you're describing right because it seems to me that maternal instinct has been applied just a blanket instinct for all women whether they have children

[00:21:03] or not they just know how to take care of yeah yeah yeah I mean I think an innate understanding of how to take care of one another is different than a process by which you learn how to do it

[00:21:17] you learn it by doing and by making mistakes and by struggling through it you know that is fundamentally different I think the early writers of instinct theory and who included maternal instinct you know one of them was William McDougall an early psychologist and he wrote that

[00:21:36] like parental love was strongest in women and could overcome all other instincts even fear itself and then he went on to write that it wasn't stronger however than a woman's education that that maternal instinct declined as women were more educated and so in order to preserve

[00:21:59] maternal instinct which for McDougall was closely connected to preserving white supremacy because it was white women he wanted to be having more babies preserving maternal instinct in his mind required social sanctions like laws against divorce or institutions that would discourage

[00:22:18] divorce and birth control and women's education and thereby keep them having babies so I mean this was not a subtle thing you know this is not like feminist scholars have not had to reach very far

[00:22:35] to see that this was a construct that was used to keep them in a certain place which is at home you talked a little bit already about how actual scientific research was also how it has historically marginalized women so I guess the approach to that which has

[00:22:58] treated women differently or has been based on the assumption that women's brains are completely different to men's brains and how culturally mothers have been quote cherished and sort of put on this pedestal so I think we can see how that categorization has hurt women

[00:23:19] and you know built these narratives over time but can you explain a little bit more about that history how women were marginalized in science and cultured I mean so women were

[00:23:31] marginalized in science and they still are in many ways so I guess I'll go back to the a group of women called referred to often as Darwinian feminists these were women like I write in the

[00:23:44] book about Antoinette Brown Blackwell who wrote one of the first feminist critique of the theory of evolution in the late 19th century and she really the narratives about what a

[00:23:57] woman was prior to that were were shaped in her world anyways by the bible and so here was a theory that broke down the wall between humans and animals and sort of freed women potentially of this like

[00:24:12] evil temptress narrative and she believed that women were going to take this and use it that they were going to look at the questions that were sort of the center of their lives and use

[00:24:23] science to answer them but what happened was that women were largely walled off from science as a professional institution that they weren't admitted to the institutions that were training people in science or to the professional organizations they were sidelined essentially and as science became

[00:24:41] a professionalized field broadly they were not admitted and so over time that changed you know generations later women started to you know more women started to become scientists and

[00:24:55] I write in the book about a group of anthropologists in the late 60s and 70s who women who were kind of among the first women in their field anthropologists evolutionary biologists studying primates

[00:25:11] and how people like Sarah Blafa-Herti and others kind of went out and did field work and realized that the narratives that they'd been told about like what primate motherhood looked like and relationships looked like didn't match what they were seeing in the field and so they started

[00:25:34] looking at all that through a different lens and came up with these very different ideas of what a mother's behavior is in different species and not sure if I'm answering your question directly

[00:25:45] enough but my point is really that like women in science changed science and that is still like a really evolving story you know you mentioned the excerpt that ran in the New York Times

[00:25:59] I got a lot of response to that and a lot of it was from angry men and some women on the internet and some of it was from scientists particularly I would say like conservative leaning

[00:26:17] scientists who embraced the idea that men and women's brains are really fundamentally different one of them in particular wrote a long essay that in response to mine that got shared by other scientists and passed around quite a bit and you know one of the arguments was that like

[00:26:36] you can see maternal instincts across other animal species and we are animals like kind of the message of like have you ever seen a mama bear protecting her cub and the problem with that

[00:26:49] argument is like I'm not arguing that she's not protective and that that's not real that like compulsion to care for her baby is not real it is I felt it myself also as a new mother

[00:27:02] it is really a fundamental piece of that experience of new parenthood it's just I don't think we get there by just this flip of a switch and also there's lots of different models of parenting all across the

[00:27:20] animal kingdom and all across mammalian species parenting looks different from species to species caregiving is like an evolutionary lever essentially that changes according to a species social niche and there are some primates in which the mothers do all of the caregiving and don't ever put their

[00:27:41] babies down until they can fend for themselves essentially and there are other primates in which there's a community of animals who care for the child and our social niche has developed

[00:27:53] in such a way that we are a hyper social species and we are that way partly because we have had babies in very close succession that's a thing that like distinguished us from other primates and in order to

[00:28:07] do that we needed help like babies couldn't be cared for only by their one mother they needed other adults to support them and so our caregiving brains developed with that in mind that was

[00:28:22] a very long answer but like I just my guess my point is we have gotten to that story in large part by women being part of science and asking questions in the context of their own lives right and that's

[00:28:37] something we need across the board not just in science right but to balance the voices and the perspectives in all parts of the world right not just science and medicine but politics and yeah

[00:28:53] absolutely I mean I think that's a huge message that women in science have changed science and that's also what we need in politics and in policy making and in how decisions are made in our

[00:29:06] community in health care health care is a big one like in terms of not only those people who are doing the caregiving but also those who are deciding how money is spent and where those resources

[00:29:18] should go. Speaking of politics so when it comes to reproductive rights in the U.S. and restrictions on abortion access one of the arguments that we often hear and we did hear from Amy Coney Barrett in the DOBS decision was essentially that if a woman doesn't want to

[00:29:57] continue a pregnancy she should just have the baby and give it up for adoption. Does your research inform any part of that do you think or would you reject that based on anything that you've

[00:30:10] found in your research? I would reject that. I mean I think that there is this biological essentialism that runs through that idea that well you can just have the baby and give it up

[00:30:23] that your body was just made to do that and so that's like a simple concept like just you have the baby and then you pass it on and it's I'm laughing at the absurdity it's not actually

[00:30:36] funny but the thing that I think stretches beyond reproductive rights but is certainly at the center of it is this idea that women can do this and simply have the baby and pass it on is grounded

[00:30:49] in this idea that like our bodies are made to do this and so we can and that like willfully ignores the fact that pregnancy is incredibly costly and I mean that from a biological sense

[00:31:06] that it is an incredible burden for our bodies in terms of the resources that we have to give to it our stress system this is something that is really underappreciated I think in our understanding

[00:31:21] of pregnancy that our stress systems are absolutely pushed to the max during pregnancy and that is in a normal in a normal pregnancy your hormones we haven't talked about hormones sort of like

[00:31:33] settling out and returning to normal after like a period of baby blues but your hormonal system has changed forever it never actually goes back exactly to what it was so I think that that idea that Amy

[00:31:47] really the DAPS decision as a whole embraced ignores the fact that we are changed by pregnancy and the early postpartum period and we are changed physically and mentally and that is not a short

[00:32:03] term reality we often think of pregnancy as like an event like something with a beginning and an end and that's in how we deal with it in the law and socially and culturally and also in healthcare

[00:32:18] you know once the baby arrives really your amounts of healthcare for the mother or the gestational parent falls off a cliff in the United States in particular and so we see it as this sort of contained event when it's actually like this really powerful developmental stage

[00:32:34] that changes you for the rest of your life can you give us some examples of how those changes stay with you sure forever I mean there are like the obvious ones that people are kind of more aware of in terms of like your physical body and especially

[00:32:51] if you have any kind of complications during pregnancy like if you have preeclampsia or more serious complications traumatic childbirth you have a C-section like those are kind of the most obvious physical things that you can have complications from over the rest of your life

[00:33:10] but also something that I think is underappreciated is the reality of traumatic childbirth and how many people experience PTSD as a result of that postpartum depression and anxiety many people experience their first ever bout with depression during the postpartum period and

[00:33:33] those who do are then more likely to experience depression later in life as well so there are these like physical and mental risks that are increased for the long term as a result of

[00:33:46] pregnancy but there are also like a lot of things that we don't understand yet because we haven't studied them there's a really fascinating researcher in Australia who is studying how anxiety essentially is processed in the brain after a pregnancy meaning well

[00:34:09] after a pregnancy she's actually studying fear specifically and how we develop fears and then extinguish fears and essentially the mechanisms for extinguishing our fears are changed by pregnancy and seem to be changed permanently her work is in rodents with there's some research that she's

[00:34:29] doing in humans also and there are like some basic brain functions that seem to be changed by pregnancy that we that over the long haul that we still don't fully understand and there is really fascinating research that looks at cognitive changes over the long term

[00:34:49] and mother specifically and you know having babies and particularly having a lot of babies raises your risk of Alzheimer's quite significantly but there's some research trying to figure out why that is and it seems like it probably is an interaction between pregnancy and particular

[00:35:10] gene variants and so if you have one of those variants then having a lot of babies increases your risk and if you don't then it's not a significant and that's sort of one example

[00:35:21] of like a bunch of things that we have to answer about how pregnancy affects your health over the long term one researcher described this to me as like kind of a last frontier of understanding

[00:35:37] disparities by sex and gender and long term health that we really haven't looked much at reproductive history as a factor in someone's long term health it's missing from like a lot

[00:35:49] a lot of studies and so what we know is it it is a major factor and we don't really know exactly how interesting yeah going back to the first example you gave about processing

[00:36:03] fear a change in how you process fear that seems to me like something that would really fundamentally probably change your perspective on a lot of things if you have to completely re-engineer how you respond to something so common yeah I mean I think

[00:36:23] I'm like a little bit reluctant to talk in depth about that research partly because it's very early and like she hasn't her name is Bronwyn Graham she hasn't like fully published those

[00:36:34] results but she talked with me about some of them but at like an anecdotal level I think that's something that would ring true for a lot of people who have had a baby we know there are

[00:36:45] changes in prevalence of anxiety and OCD and other kind of manifestations of worry bipolar disorder as well and then just that like kind of a non-clinical level I think others often say

[00:36:58] many have told me like I can't watch scary movies anymore or you know the news affects me really differently than it used to so I do think whether we like point to like a specific

[00:37:11] brain circuit that changes that has that result or not I talk a lot in the book about how these broader changes in the brain cause this like shift in worldview and how you relate

[00:37:25] to things that are happening around you and to other people and so I think that is real okay I'll move on a little bit from a history I just want to something that is so cool that

[00:37:39] just in talking about how having a pregnancy affects your body over the long term something else that I really love to talk about is pregnancy results in something called microchimerism which is when fetal cells cross the placenta into the parent's body not just like pieces of DNA but

[00:37:59] actual cells and essentially like take up residence in the body and their function is like a little bit unknown still that it seems like they may be beneficial in some ways they're found at often

[00:38:15] at like the site of c-section scars or other wounds that they may have a role in healing and directing resources towards the injury for the body to recover from it but there's also some indication that that they may also result in some cost to the gestational parent that

[00:38:34] they're appear often in like mammary tissue so there might be like directing resources towards milk production but they've been found also in the brain and one study looked at the brains of a

[00:38:46] range of women and found these fetal cells in one woman as old as 94 so they seem to stay in the body and so I think this is really like elegant example of there is no like

[00:38:59] end point to a pregnancy in terms of how it affects us over the long haul like these pieces of our pregnancy of the fetus remain in us forever and it's something we don't understand yet but it

[00:39:15] seems to have you know real consequences good and potentially in conflict with our own bodies you know over the long haul and there's still so much that we don't know those changes I think

[00:39:30] one of the first examples you give in the book one of the real life examples is a woman who thought that she wanted to go back to work soon after she had her baby sooner than she was offered

[00:39:45] maternity leave I guess yeah but after she had her child she wasn't sure she wanted to go back at all based on the research you've done would you put that down to the initial anxiety and worry

[00:39:58] she had about her child and I guess her presence reassuring herself that everything was okay or was that maybe part of the longer term change where her focus changed or would she return

[00:40:14] to her career eventually or find that as interesting later when she got past the postpartum period it's an interesting question I have her name was Emily and I'm trying to think of how she would

[00:40:28] answer that I can probably better answer that question from my perspective because in some ways her story in mind were similar in that like early worry so I felt that intense like worry and protection sense of protection in the early postpartum period and there is research that has

[00:40:47] found that these circuits that are really highly active in those early postpartum months that are really focused on directing our attention towards our baby these are areas of the brain that are involved in motivation and meaning making and vigilance so I think of them as

[00:41:04] like the things that like help us to keep our babies alive to like really stay focused on meeting their needs and also push us into this really intense period of learning because you're so

[00:41:15] closely focused on them that you can't help really but like learn their cues and what they need and there's a sense in the research that that high activity shifts over time around possibly three to four months essentially as your social cognition the networks that are involved in

[00:41:31] social cognition are changed that activity becomes like more balanced basically you get better at reading their cues and that making the mistakes that you have to and shifting your behavior as a result that process of becomes a little bit easier or you're more finely tuned

[00:41:50] and so there's like a drop in that hypervigilance activity I can see that in my own experience that my own kind of like cocooning eased a little bit over time I describe it in the book as kind

[00:42:04] of a little bit of exposure therapy like you take your baby out into the world and you realize that like they're okay you also get help from other people and you realize that that's okay like

[00:42:16] you kind of just do it slowly and you realize it's possible I do feel like I guess maybe because of that change in social cognition there is like a certain kind of reprioritizing things like

[00:42:34] I can't ever put my kids aside you know it's entirely to focus on something else they are always going to be in my mind or at least it's hard to do that it's hard to ever close that

[00:42:47] piece off so I think that speaks to some of these long-term changes I talk in the book about these brain networks that are involved in our sense of ourselves are changed the systems that

[00:43:02] take the cues coming from our own bodies and what's happening in the world around us and create these like narratives about who we are and what we need and that we use to like predict our own needs

[00:43:14] in the future those networks are changed and one researcher described it to me as like it's possible that they are sort of extended to now include our children as well so that there is

[00:43:30] like yeah there is like an extension of the self in a way has like some neurobiological grounding and I'd imagine that that intense period of learning the baby's cues as you were describing

[00:43:46] and that hypervigilance you said yes yeah takes up everything right I can imagine that it takes of all of the brain's capacity right so it would make sense then that you can't yeah imagine trying

[00:44:01] to squeeze anything else in a job I mean it's really fascinating there's some great research in rodents that really shows this very clearly that there are some rodents rodents who were essentially raised to be dependent on cocaine then when they become mothers they're like set

[00:44:20] up into these tasks where they can choose between the cocaine and their pups and they choose the pups so it's like pups are just this really powerful stimuli this really power you know that's hard to

[00:44:33] deny oh that's fascinating so we don't have a lot of time left but I want to ask now you've explained what the past narrative was and how it marginalized women and what

[00:44:50] the science tells us now what would you like the new narrative of parenthood to be and how do you think that we make that take hold or do you see a fix of that happening now yeah I

[00:45:05] I would like to see new parenthood really embraced as a developmental stage of life and if we fully do that I think it requires us to make some major changes in our healthcare system

[00:45:23] in our social policies and also in how we talk to one another about what it means to become a parent I like to look toward like the teenage brain science that body research is a little bit

[00:45:34] farther ahead than the parental brain science and it's been used in really interesting ways it's been used here in the United States for example to change school start times because there's a recognition now that the teenage brain needs more sleep and happens on like a different circadian

[00:45:51] rhythm it's been used in some places to change disciplinary practices in schools and to change how we deliver like public health messages to teenagers around substance use and other risky behaviors and it's also been used that's like been taken to parents themselves to say

[00:46:11] here's what's happening with your teenager and here's what that might mean for your relationship and how you raise them and this is what's happening in their brains like understand them better and similarly it's been given to teenagers to say like this is an important

[00:46:27] moment for your mental health this is what's happening in your brain and here's how you can help yourself and I feel like a very similar conversation needs to happen with the parental brain research to take it to the policymakers and the institutions that impact young families health

[00:46:44] and well-being to say like we need to start thinking about this and we need to give it to people who work with new parents and who are new parents to say like this is what's

[00:46:55] happening in your brain and here's the support that you likely will need and how to get it and here's how you can help yourself yeah and there's a relief in that I think because if you

[00:47:08] as you describe in the book if you were are just thinking about it really insularly or you imagine that it's only you that feels this way there's such a loneliness and fear I think in

[00:47:20] that so with just the knowledge that it's a universal experience or as a developmental stage right that everyone experiences similarly then it can be a relief yeah I think a lot of people express feeling blindsided by the change in themselves and their inner lives in new parenthood

[00:47:45] and I really do think the science can help us avoid some of that by giving people the language that they need to understand what they're going through when it happens and on that subject one

[00:47:58] of the things that I really loved about your book is that it is scientific but still totally accessible I feel like anybody can understand it the way you've explained these things so are there

[00:48:12] other books that you think tackled this subject or similar subjects in the same way in the same accessible way yes this is like the first book that kind of really dives deep into the parental

[00:48:28] brain research for like a lay audience I would say but there are one of the researchers who I quote a lot in the book and who was really important for shaping this book her name is Jodi Paluski

[00:48:41] and she has a book that she's written in French that is about to come out in an English English language version it's called Mommy Brain I love her and I agree with her on a lot we like

[00:48:51] differ a little bit about the use of that phrase but I have read parts of that book and it's also very worthwhile and written from the perspective of someone who's done this research and is also a

[00:49:03] clinician I would also say there are two books that I love about the history of motherhood and culture and science one is called the nature and nurture of love by Marga Vesado she's a historian

[00:49:17] a medical historian and the other is called from Eve to Evolution by Kimberly Hamlin those are different in that they're really like looking at the history of the science more than what's current but they're really interesting right lastly I wanted to ask a question about the

[00:49:36] feminine mystique by Betty Friedan Anna and I recorded an episode about that that will be out later this season and during it we talked about the idea that women would be entirely fulfilled by

[00:49:47] being housewives taking care of their husbands and children all day which is what Friedan covers in the book I'd like to ask you what you think the new feminine mystique might be if your research shows that a mother's brain is changing and life is evolving dramatically then it

[00:50:02] makes sense that they might be consumed by life as a mother and it sounds like maybe this previous idea of the feminine mystique from the 50s and 60s was somehow extended to apply to all women

[00:50:16] all the time rather than a specific developmental stage that you talk about in your book what do you think then most women then be looking else you know for something so I hear you and I feel like

[00:50:34] this is a little bit tricky and in the nuance but also like an important part of the conversation that doesn't actually come up and interviews a lot so thanks for asking about it that like

[00:50:44] early stage is really intense and I think it is undeniable that like our focus is pulled to our children it's necessary and it eases over time and I think it can be true both things

[00:51:00] can be true that like we are fundamentally changed by having kids and we still want to be humans out in the world right like just because we are changed by them doesn't mean that our whole

[00:51:14] focus is them and that we will be completely fulfilled by that role and that is like so grounded in gender essentialism you know and these old ideas of what a mother is and like maternal instinct I

[00:51:26] think has this piece attached to it that it is an instinct that overcomes all else so that we will be fulfilled in that role when in reality these brain changes happen in the context of

[00:51:40] the brains we already have like this is a growth of who we are to begin with and who we are changes but doesn't like it's not subsumed by the parental brain we grow with the brains we already have

[00:51:54] which includes you know our interests and our and our strengths and also our challenges you know all the capacities we have come with us and that is true and also I think we develop

[00:52:11] we can develop in a way that even brings us into new capacities there's some research that is only like a very small handful of studies that looks at how our brains respond to or even

[00:52:28] interact with other adult brains after we've had babies and this has been in particular like in relationship to partners or to other caregivers like how we relate to other caregivers may change and a part of the book where I really kind of very transparently like extrapolate from that

[00:52:49] because this is not grounded in science yet but like I kind of imagine what those findings could mean is like what if that role as caregiver becomes like a construct for how we see the world

[00:53:02] around us and so now we relate to other parents in a new way our social cognition or our empathy anyways for other people changes are like desires for how we want to interact in our

[00:53:16] communities change and maybe even grow or extend beyond our family unit in new ways so I just I think this idea of like the angel of the house has so limited our understanding

[00:53:30] of what a parent can be and the science really opens us up to like a lot of new possibilities thank you Chelsea that was fascinating and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk more

[00:53:43] about your book thanks for listening the story of woman is a one-woman operation run by me Anna Stecline so if you enjoy listening and want to help me on this mission of adding woman's

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