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Becoming a parent changes us deeply. It changes our brain, our behavior, our thoughts, our hormones, our biology, and our body. With awareness and knowledge, this can be a beautiful gift—specialized brains to take care of and bond with our infants, a new period of neuroplasticity where we might find healing for ourselves.
Despite the cultural pressure to “bounce back,” there is no going back. Doing so would be like a teenager going back to being a child, or a child going back to being a baby. Our brains and minds are shaped for parenting. But we can ride this wave and allow it to transform us for the better, allow it to guide us toward nurture, responsivity, and emotional connection with our babies, and to be healthier overall.
Everyone who becomes a parent—regardless of how, regardless of their gender, and regardless of their status as primary or secondary caregiver—undergoes massive brain changes. Parent brains experience bigger changes, and gain more abilities for parenting, in proportion to the amount of time parents spend nurturing their baby at the very beginning of life. The first few months of being a parent are a sensitive period, a season for the development of the parent brain where nurture is essential to change the brain to benefit parents and their babies.
Signals from the baby are what change our brains, beginning either in pregnancy, as a mother or birthing parent, or throughout the first few months postpartum as nonbirthing parents. Primary caregivers, who spend the most time with the baby and provide the most nurture, have the biggest parental brain changes and the strongest nurturing superpowers (1).
Sensitivity to Your Baby’s Communication
Crying is very important communication for babies and essential to their survival. Babies cry when they need comfort, stress regulation, or a physical need from their parents. As a new parent, you develop an enhanced ability to hear crying and the drive to run to your crying baby. Crying is the baby’s survival brain saying, “I need help now,” and your parent brain is adapted to hear this important signal, to go to your baby and respond. Your and your baby’s brains have evolved to be connected by their crying. Reliably responding to your baby’s cries during daytime and nighttime shapes their emotional brain. (2)
Enhanced Empathy
Parent brains develop enhanced abilities for empathy. This includes an enhanced ability for theory of mind, which is the ability to understand other people’s minds and emotions, with enhanced empathy, an ability to understand or feel the same emotions as another person. Enhanced theory of mind allows us to respond to our baby’s communication effectively and provide a reliable external brain for our babies. The more we develop theory of mind, the more we are sensitive and nurturing to our babies. (3)
Enhanced Threat Detection
The parent brain develops circuitry to anticipate and protect infants from threats. This is a wide network that includes the amygdala. Enhanced threat detection helps us keep our babies safe. Our parent brains are constantly scanning the environment, predicting where threats might occur and directing our babies to safety. (4)
Feelings of Motivation, Reward, and Calm
When we become parents, our brain becomes specially wired to feel motivation, reward, and calm from being with our babies. These changes happen in our dopamine system, the system that is activated by anything we find enjoyable, like good food, intimacy, music, or movement. When we become parents, our babies become a primary source of intensely good rewarding feelings. The changes also happen as oxytocin exerts a calming effect. This is why many parents feel the calmest and safest when they are with their babies. (5)
The more we nurture our babies, the more we develop our parent brains, and the more we can nurture our babies towards lifelong mental wellness. It’s a beautiful cycle.
References
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4
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Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. Neuroimage 21, 1155– 1166 (2004); Atzil, S. et al. Dopamine in the medial amygdala network mediates human bonding. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114, 2361–2366 (2017).
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