What Parenting Really Does to Our Brains with Chelsea Conaboy

Author and journalist Chelsea Conaboy explains how neuroscience can help us to better understand parenthood

Source: Anna Shvets/Pexels

Today’s interview is with Chelsea Conaboy. Chelsea is a health and science journalist who writes for The New York Times, Mother Jones, Politico, the Boston Sunday Globe magazine, National Journal, and The Week. She recently wrote a book called Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. I wanted to interview Chelsea because I think the neuroscience behind how our brains change with parenthood is fascinating and has important applications for how we understand parenthood and caregiving. You can read the full interview transcript or listen to the audio version below.

Listen to the podcast here:

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Parenting Translator newsletter and podcast. I'm Dr. Cara Goodwin, and today I'm so excited because I'm here with Chelsea Conaboy, who wrote a recent book called Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, which I think is just a fascinating topic. We all have heard so many myths and misconceptions about “mommy brain” and I can't wait to hear all about the research on what is actually going on in our brains during this very exciting transition to parenthood. Chelsea, could you please introduce yourself and tell us why you chose to write this book?

Chelsea Conaboy: I am a health and science journalist. I spent most of my career in newspapers, and I was an editor here at a newspaper in Maine in 2015 when my first child was born. I had read all of the books. I had done all of the parenting classes. I really felt like I had done my homework to prepare for parenthood. And still I was blindsided by it and particularly by the experience of just being really overwhelmed with worry for my baby and feeling that like a shift in myself, in my inner life and not having the words to explain it. This book really came about because I went looking for those words. I went looking for information that could help me understand what I was going through. And I found it in the parental brain science.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Amazing. I also experienced that as a new mother. I remember I thought “I have a PhD in child psychology. Of course I'll be the perfect mother. I already know everything.” It quickly became apparent that I knew nothing. I felt completely clueless. It doesn't matter what training, what experience, what research you've done, the experience of parenthood is just so unique and it can't even really be put into words. It's hard to even describe.

I think we've all heard of this idea of “Mommy Brain” Everybody, anyone who's become a parent, whether mother or father or however you identify yourself as a caretaker, anybody knows that becoming a parent changes you to the core. This topic is very rarely discussed. People talk about sleep schedules and whatever else, but they don't talk about the fact you're going to become a totally different person. That part is totally glossed over, and a lot of what you hear is based on stereotypes rather than real science. Of course that bothers me because I would like to know what's the real science here. Can you start with the basics and tell us what exactly are the hormone changes and the brain changes that happen with the transition to parenthood? And maybe we start with mothers and people who experience birth? And then we can go into other parents.

Chelsea Conaboy: I like to say that there are two things that change the brain. One is hormones and the other is experience. We talk so much about hormones during pregnancy. Increases in estrogen and progesterone and spikes in oxytocin and changes in your prolactin system. We so often frame those things as changes that are helping shape your body so that you can carry this pregnancy to term. Then they're also playing an important role in initiating childbirth and lactation. We really don't talk about what they're doing to the brain. These are all neurochemicals, too. What researchers now understand is that they are essentially priming the brain. They're making it more plastic or malleable so that the brain will essentially be ready to receive our babies, who are these incredibly powerful stimuli for the brain. The hormones help us to be ready for our babies, but then our babies themselves shape us. It's the experience of caring for them that really creates the adaptive parental brain that we have. In the early postpartum period, we're kind of propelled into a hyper-responsive state— we're made so that all of our attention is hyper-focused on our babies so that we go back to try to meet their needs again and again, even maybe when we have no real practical skills for doing so.

The research shows that in the early postpartum period, the brain regions that are involved with motivation, vigilance, and meaning-making are highly active in response to our babies. That's what’s really compelling us to go back again and again, to pay close attention to our babies and to go back again and again to try to meet their needs. Then over time, it's thought that that early intensity kind of evens out, that we basically get better at understanding our baby's internal mental states and emotions and reflecting those things back in our own bodies and responding to them. Instead, what we get are the brain regions that are involved in social cognition, reading another person, and interpreting their mental states are fine-tuned over time. It's really those hormonal changes that are preparing us for parenting, but then it's our interactions with our babies themselves and their particular needs and personalities that ultimately shapes our own parental brain into this flexible, adaptive state that our babies need us to be in.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Amazing. I love how you describe that because you're talking about this hyper-focus, you're talking about the areas of our brain involved in social cognition getting stronger and more fine-tuned— they sound like strengths to me. These all sound like good changes. I think when we hear “mommy brain,” people are talking about being scatterbrained and forgetful. Personally, I take offense to that term because I've been pregnant or breastfeeding basically for the last ten years. I'm on my fourth pregnancy right now, and if the “mommy brain” stereotypes are true, then I have not been a competent individual for the last ten years, which I just don't believe is true. I think this stereotype exists out there to make mothers feel like they aren't competent, and they aren't able to achieve anything outside of being a mother. I think it's very important to correct that myth. Can you tell us, is there any truth to this? You've talked about the hyper-focus, you've talked about some of these strengths, but is there any truth to the increased forgetfulness and the increased scatter brain feeling?

Chelsea Conaboy: I'm so glad you asked this. I really don't like the phrase “mommy brain” at all. I also take offense to it, even though I wrote a book called Mother Brain. What we know about the science is that there is some evidence of small and temporary memory deficits during pregnancy. But again, small and temporary. The issue I have is that if we talk about anything related to mother's brains, that's what we talk about. But it's just one small sliver of a much more complex and interesting picture of how our brains adapt to parenthood. There are these strengths that we gain. This is not a neurodegenerative time. And part of the problem is that researchers have only just begun to look at this in human mothers and human parents to see what we gain from parenthood. They've done it for years. They've been quantifying or trying to quantify with quite mixed results that forgetful, frazzled stereotype. They're only beginning to look at what we gain and what they found so far is amazing. 

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, that is amazing, because I think of the ways I have grown in terms of empathy and other areas of social cognition as a mother.  There’s been extreme benefits to my work life as well. My work life is related to parenting— it’s a little bit more closely tied. But I've heard from a lot of other mothers who have said that they feel like they have these new strengths. I think it's very important to remember that it isn't just all negative, that there are some real strengths that are added with parenting.

Chelsea Conaboy: I think it's important to note that this is a pretty young field. We only have information right now on what happens in the early postpartum period. We have a few studies that go out a couple of years out from childbirth, and then we have a few studies that look at older parents in much later life and that look at parenthood as a potential neuroprotective factor for the brain. But there's like a whole very large middle there, right? I have so many questions— some of which I outlined in the book. Like what does parenthood mean for how we connect to other people who aren't our children? What does it mean for how we connect with our partners? What does it mean for our creativity and our multitasking management and our long-term cognitive load? There's been a lot of art and in some ways like psychology, but not a lot of neuroscience that's focused on that. I hope that's coming.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, I really hope so too. That would be really interesting. I always say that working parents are the most efficient people in the world because we don't waste any time during our day. We are getting it done. I was working as a part-time psychologist and right after I had my first and I remember my supervisor told me that I saw more patients as a part-time psychologist, then two full-time people combined. That is the power of a working mother. We get in, we get it done.

Chelsea Conaboy: No time to waste.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, we're efficient and I think that's a huge strength. We've heard a lot about changes to the mother's brain or the person who's experiencing pregnancy and postpartum, but what about the father or the partner's brain? Or also adoptive and foster parents who serve in that parent role but didn't give birth and experience postpartum?

Chelsea Conaboy:  I think this is a really important message of the book, that this is not just a story for mothers or for gestational parents. This science really applies to everyone who's really committed to caring for children. And overwhelmingly, the science is still focused predominantly on gestational mothers. But what we see in fathers and others is really interesting and tells a very similar story, that they too are shaped by the same two things: hormones and experience. And what we see in fathers is that they go through significant shifts in hormones as fatherhood approaches. They have changes to their testosterone system, to their prolactin system, which we often think of as a milk-making hormone, but it's really involved in bonding. They experience similar spikes in oxytocin when they interact with their babies that mothers do. And they have significant changes in activity and connectivity across what researchers call the global parental caregiving network in the brain— so brain regions that are highly involved in caregiving.

Now we have research recently that also shows that these structural changes that we see in mothers brains, like the actual change in volume that mothers experience across pregnancy in the postpartum period, specifically in brain regions involved in social cognition that's present in fathers too. Fathers have all of the similar domains of change that mothers do, the activity and connectivity and these anatomical changes, these structural changes to their brains.

One interesting thing to note is there seems to be a dose effect for fathers. There was an important study that came out of Israel a few years ago that looked at gay fathers and straight couples and found that basically across all of the fathers in the study, the more involved a father was in direct caregiving of their child and being really responsible for doing that work, of reading their social cues and responding to them, the more time they committed to that, the more significant change they had in connectivity and activity in two brain regions that were specific to social cognition. It was a dose effect. You do that work, you engage in caregiving in a meaningful way and you have more adaptive change.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That is so interesting, and I think I've experienced that in my own life. We have three kids and we're about to have our fourth. As we have more kids, my husband has spent more and more time doing child care because one person just can't, right?  I've told him about all this science because I'm just such a nerd about it. I just love talking about it. Now he'll be like, “I think I can feel the oxytocin” after cuddling with our baby. I've definitely seen that change in my own family as well. You said that you started researching and writing about the shifts in mothers’ brains because of your own postpartum experiences. Can you share a little bit about some of your own experiences that led you to write this book?

Chelsea Conaboy: My son was born a little bit on the small side. He was five pounds and 12oz, and I just remember feeling like he was so tiny and so vulnerable.  I wondered could I do it, could I give him what he needed? Did I have what it took? That worry was this constant static in my mind. I felt like I'm supposed to know how to do this, but I don't, and can I figure it out?  I guess it was just this feeling of uncertainty and overwhelm and it was constant. There was some research that was coming out at the time around maternal anxiety, specifically that was really focused on these brain regions, this hyper-vigilance, this hyper-responsiveness that many people feel in the early postpartum period. I was reading the science and seeing these brain changes happen in all gestational parents, right? So it's not just those who experience anxiety, but part of this adaptive process that happens to the brain. It's possible that sometimes it goes wrong or it's too intense, and that's when you feel this anxiety. But these brain changes are happening in everyone, and we're not talking about it. That really helped me to reframe my experience, to see this worry and sense of overwhelm that I'm feeling is something I need to look at and address. But also, maybe it's part of a productive process that I'm going through that's shaping me into the parent that I need to be and that really set me off on this path to think about, wow, the brain changes, and what else am I missing? Because we're not talking about that.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: That is so important. I read a research study recently showing that nearly 100% of parents experience intrusive thoughts with their babies, such as what if I fell down the stairs holding my baby right now? I have definitely experienced those as a new parent. They're extremely disturbing, and they kind of come out of nowhere, and you think what is wrong with me that I'm thinking about that? And it's so normal, but we never talk about it. Everybody's experiencing it but when you experience it for the first time and nobody's warned you about that, it's scary. You have this thought of what is wrong with me that these thoughts are just popping into my brain out of nowhere.

Chelsea Conaboy:  I certainly had them. I remember trying to take my baby to the grocery store for the first time and just being in a full body sweat. Something that felt so normal and basic just felt terrifying. From getting them into the car, figuring out how to manage the grocery cart, all the people around you, getting them back to the cart, to the car with the groceries. It's everything. The way I describe it in the book is that it's kind of like the window of our attention is closed so that we can just really focus on our babies. At the same time, the threats, the potential threats that cross that plane feel much bigger because we're so intensely focused on them and everything else we sort of see in relationship to their safety. It's really disorienting.

But if you can look at it from an evolutionary perspective, our newborn babies need our attention more than anything, even more than our love. They need our attention in order to stay alive. They have all of these needs, these constantly changing needs that they need us to respond to. They can't feed themselves; they can't keep themselves clean or warm or well fed and they need us to do it.  They need us to do it even when we really don't know how to do it. They capture our attention, and they hold onto it real tight.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: So that makes me think there's this idea that parenting, but mothering in particular should come to us instinctually. The minute they place the baby in your arms, it's like suddenly you know exactly what to do. I remember having my first baby and older people especially telling me, just follow your instincts. Don't listen to anybody, just follow your instincts. And I'm like, that's actually not helpful because I don't know what my instincts are. I feel like as I'm about to have my fourth child, I'm finally getting some sort of maternal instinct. But it's come from years of experience. It didn’t come from some sort of chemical change that instantly happened the minute they handed me my first baby.

Chelsea Conaboy: It's not an instinct then, right? It is a process of learning. It is what you have learned from ten years of caring for children and caring for different children. Meeting their needs in different ways and struggling right through that process. Making mistakes and trying new things and doing better next time. What new parenthood is, is inherently a process of really intense learning. That's it from a very common sense way of looking at it. You're learning how to do this. It's just, I guess two things make it extra hard. One is that we're primed for really intense learning because of our hormonal changes and because the really intense needs of our babies. And the other thing that makes it hard is this myth that we're supposed to know how to do it, that it's not a process. And that's a real problem.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: The brain science definitely backs up this idea that the maternal instinct from the minute your baby is born is a myth.

Chelsea Conaboy:  I would argue yes. It’s a big piece of my book looking at why that is and what damage has been done by that myth. An instinct, by definition, is a rigid pattern of behavior, something that unfolds in us automatically and universally with similar effects across the whole species. And that's not what happens with new parenthood. What new parenthood is, is a stage of development. And there are things that happen that follow similar patterns across the species, but that change depending on our circumstances, depending on the kind of pregnancy we have, depending on our social context and the challenges and strengths that we bring to the role, the way our brain has already been shaped by our life experience. And that change depending on our baby and their own sense of agency and genetics.

I can talk a little bit about how we got this old idea, if you want to. Yeah, this was a big part of my research for the book, basically when I started looking at the science and asking, why isn't it already more of a part of our conversation around what parenthood is like? The human research on the parental brain, it's relatively new. A lot of it's come out in the last 20 years or so, but there's a pretty robust medical literature or research literature around other animals that dates back to the 60’s and I thought, why isn't this already a part of the story of what it means to become a parent?

I stated realizing that's partly because we have this other story that's already so pervasive in our society, and that's the story of maternal instinct. I started looking at how did we get that story? Where did it come from, and how did it become part of scientific theory? The truth is that it is an idea that comes from religious and moral notions of what it means to be a woman and a mother. That in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were written into scientific theory, partly by Charles Darwin and by the social Darwinists who followed him, and then by early psychologists who really wrote instinct theory.

One example that I like to talk about is William McDougall, who was an early psychologist, and he wrote this long list of human instincts that included maternal instinct, which he described as being stronger than any other instinct, including fear itself. But he also wrote that the more a woman is educated, the more her maternal instinct will decline. He advocated for the preservation of gender norms, including limited education for women and limited rights for women to own property or to vote or to divorce.  William McDougall was a really noted eugenicist, and for him, the preservation of maternal instinct was really closely entwined with the preservation of white supremacy. That's really where this idea came from. It was a means of social control, particularly for white women.

It was then recast again and again over time by a long list of experts who use different words to describe this but carried it forward all the way. You mentioned this idea of trusting your instincts. Trust yourself. Those were the famous first words of Dr. Spock's book, trust yourself. This idea that you know how to do it, those were words that gave a lot of women relief because they had for decades been told exactly how to raise their children. He was revolutionary because he said, well, actually, you know how to do this. Trust yourself, but inherent. That was also this sense of biological essentialism that you've got it. You've got what you need to do this, and it's written into your biology.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Wow. I had no idea about this history. That is really fascinating. Now as mothers we have choices. We know that more education doesn't reduce maternal instinct. It’s great that we know this and as mothers now we are encouraged to a certain extent to pursue a career and even pursue our own passions and that's so wonderful. But something I've struggled with myself as a mother is I have my own career ambitions, I have my own passions. I have relationships like friendships and my marriage that don't involve my children. These are important to me too. But especially in the periods right after I've had babies, I feel those brain changes that make me hyper-attuned to the baby. I do feel this worry and this fear about separating from my children. These are real experiences and so I can't pretend like that doesn't exist. This is a big question but how do we as mothers balance our professional ambitions and our other relationships and our passions. These are important things too. And I know if I spend every second with my children, I wouldn't be a great mother either. We're balancing all these but we also have these real brain changes that are making us hyper-focused on our children. So how do we balance that? 

Chelsea Conaboy: First I'll just say it is hard. There is no real solution to that. I think one important distinction though is in those early months when you are in that hyper-responsive, hyper-attentive state maybe we should be given the freedom to focus on our babies. That's why we need parental leave. That is a time when our biology is wanting us to give them all of our attention and we need the support to do that. And that's why parental leave is important for mothers and partners. Any caregivers of babies it's essential to support. We talk a lot about why babies need that, but parents need it too, including fathers and non-gestational parents. They need that time to devote their attention to their babies because it's changing them. Also it's helping them to adapt to this new role.

I think sometimes the answer is to okay, acknowledge, respect that biology and what your baby needs and what you need as a parent. Then the other piece of this is rooted to some degree on our overemphasis on the mother-child dyad as the only essential relationship in a child's life. One thing I talk a lot about in the book is how we are cooperative rearers. That's what humans are. We have this conservative idea, particularly in American society where and specifically particular parts of American society where the nuclear family is king and that mothers belong at home with their babies, that children are the sole responsibility of mothers. The reality is that's never really been the human way until quite recently. Even from the earliest humans, one thing that set us apart from other primates was that we relied on other people to help raise our children. That's how we were able to have babies closer together, which is the thing that shaped us into an intensely social species and made us the most dominant primate species on the planet. So human nature is really rooted in this identity as cooperative rearers. I think we've lost that in a lot of ways in our society.

I don't totally know the way forward and how to rebuild that. Except one thing I think about a lot is how we value caregivers, like how we invest in caregivers and not just mothers. One way is to give adequate parental leave. Another way is to really say how important the work of people who are helping to raise children--the nannies, the early childhood educators, the daycare providers, partners and grandparents and aunts and neighbors and babysitters. These people are not just like backstops to a neglectful mother. They are essential child rearers who have also developed these specialized skills for raising children. So we need to invest in them. We need to pay them what they're worth and invest in the infrastructure that supports their work.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes, that is such an important point. When you hear statistics on how especially early childhood educators are paid in the United States, so many of them live below the poverty line. It's unbelievable how little we value these roles. These are the people raising the next generation. How is this not the most important thing in our society?

Chelsea Conaboy: Right. When we think about it from the perspective of the neuroscience, we don't have the research on this yet, but I hope we get it eventually. But this idea that experience raising a child changes the brain, how does that apply to people who spend their days with children as caregivers, as classroom leaders? We don't know that yet, but it's likely that it does. So often we think about the work they do as low-wage work, as sort of soft skills. But they are specialized baby tenders and their brains have adapted in ways that help them to read and respond to those babies’ needs. We should see value in that.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I could not agree with you more. The people who are caregivers, especially to young children, are essential to our society, especially if we're not willing to give parents any paid leave. We need these people. You can't have one without the other. I'm so curious to know— personally, how has your understanding of the brain changes with parenting changed your own day-to-day parenting and your perspectives on parenting?

Chelsea Conaboy: I'll mention two things. One, it really helped me to feel kind of to reframe my early postpartum experience, to maybe feel less guilt about how much I worried. To see it as like an intense period of time that I had to go through to become the parent that I needed to be. It helped me to learn how to take care of my child and also to learn what I needed for support in doing that. The other way I think about this almost every day is that it's given me really a lot more grace and patience with myself as a parent. Specifically, this idea that I'm not supposed to know what to do all the time, that parenting is a process and it's a learning process. Specifically, part of that process is making mistakes and using them to figure out how to do better next time. That is a message that I really carry close to my heart.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. That is so important. One more question just to end this out. If you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing as a new mother, what do you think it would be?

Chelsea Conaboy: I think it would be that you're doing great. Just take a breath. It sounds so simple, but you get so caught up in whether you're doing it right in that time of life. I wish I had just let myself take my time and feel that's what I needed, what I needed was time. And I was doing great. I was learning along the way.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Yes. I totally echo that feeling that it's so important to know that everybody is struggling, especially the early postpartum period, just because nobody talks about it. Not enough people are talking about it but I feel like people are starting to talk about it. It’s so important to know that everybody's struggling. This is universally hard. I always say going from zero to one child for me was the hardest. Everybody has a different opinion. But I thin that everything about your life 100% changes. Everything is different, and there's nothing like that.

Chelsea Conaboy: It's something I like to say as often as possible, that this stage of life, this developmental stage, is really inherently distressing. I interviewed lots of people for this book. I've talked to lots of people since then. And to a person, every single person experiences some sort of psychological distress. Whether it's from fertility issues to pregnancy complications and traumatic childbirth or postpartum experience or going back to work. There is distress. Everyone struggles. It is totally normal to need support. What doesn't have to be normal, what shouldn't be normal, is suffering in that struggle. We need to do a better job to make sure that fewer people do.

Dr. Cara Goodwin:  Yes, it’s so important to remember that distress is part of it. Anxiety is part of it. The normal feelings of mood swings are part of it. But if you are experiencing distress to the extent that you feel like you need help, when it's impacting your day-to-day functioning, you need to seek help from a mental health professional. We need to normalize the distress, but also, you need to ask for help if you feel like you cannot cope with it yourself because it's so important.

 Chelsea Conaboy: The thing is, it's also normal to need the support.  Everyone needs some of it. You cannot do this by yourself. If you're not getting it and you're struggling, then it's normal to seek it out, to find new sources, which might be a psychologist, it might be your OBGYN, it might be a different support group, or it might be medication. It's normal to need the support.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: I think that's such an important message from the science you've been talking about that we aren't supposed to do this alone. There's a reason that other humans are drawn into caregiving as well. The birthing parent is not supposed to be doing this alone. We need support, we need help. However, it is you form that village of support for you and your child, you need that.

Chelsea Conaboy: Human mothers from the very beginning have always been really important, and they've never been enough.

Dr. Cara Goodwin:Yes. Such an important point. It should not all fall on our shoulders. That could not be emphasized enough. This has been beyond fascinating. Can you please tell my readers and listeners where to find more information about you and your book?

Chelsea Conaboy: They can get the book Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood wherever they buy books online or in their local bookstore, and there's more information about it at www.motherbrainbook.com. They'll also find a link there to sign up for my newsletter, which is called Between Us.

Dr. Cara Goodwin: Great. That has been so helpful. Thank you so much for all this very interesting information. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for coming on to the show today.

Chelsea Conaboy: Thank you so much for having me.

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Welcome to the Parenting Translator newsletter! I am Dr. Cara Goodwin, a licensed psychologist with a PhD in child psychology and mother to three children (currently a 3-year-old, 5-year-old, and 7-year-old). I specialize in taking all of the research that is out there related to parenting and child development and turning it into information that is accurate, relevant, and useful for parents! I recently turned these efforts into a non-profit organization since I believe that all parents deserve access to unbiased and free information. This means that I am only here to help YOU as a parent so please send along any feedback, topic suggestions, or questions that you have! You can also find me on Instagram @parentingtranslator, on TikTok @parentingtranslator, and my website (www.parentingtranslator.com).

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