'Something was different': How parents' brains change and adapt after a baby is born

Our grey matter changes when we become parents to a newborn baby

Picture: iStock 

After Chelsea Conaboy gave birth to her first child, she felt unmoored — like there was something wrong with her. 

“I felt something was different in me. I had this really intense hyper-vigilance in my first weeks as a mother. I didn’t have words to describe what was happening. Not only was I worried about my son’s wellbeing and my capacity to be a good mother, I was worried about the worry.

“I felt the maternal instinct I’d anticipated kicking in was damaged and that I’d already failed him,” says Conaboy, on the phone from Maine, New England.

A veteran journalist, specialising in personal and public health, Conaboy’s alarm at how different she felt — which she sensed was happening on a brain level — led her to do what she routinely does in her day job, look for answers.

“I delved into the science and I found it so helpful in quieting my disquiet — reassuring me that I was going through an adaptive process.”

Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain. 

The result of her scientific quest is her just-published book, Mother Brain: Separating Myth from Biology — the Science of the Parental Brain.

Conaboy explains that the rocketing flood of hormones that come with pregnancy, labour, and lactation jump-start the brain for plasticity. But the really important message, she says, is that changes taking place in the parent’s brain are fundamentally adaptive.

“Parenthood puts us into a dramatically different role to what the vast majority of us have experienced before — total responsibility for a vulnerable human who can’t communicate their needs and who hasn’t the brain development to regulate themselves.

“In the early months of parenting, brain regions related to motivation, vigilance, and meaning-making [making sense of baby’s cues] increase in activity and connectivity.”

Powerful stimuli for all caregivers

Conaboy cites a study by researchers in Spain who found a parallel between the parental brain and the teenage one. 

“They compared the degree of change that happens between pre-pregnancy and two months postpartum, to the degree of change that happens in adolescent girls. They found a similar pattern of change.

“We know adolescence is an adaptive stage in life. It’s hormonal and comes with an increased risk of mental illness and behaviour change. There’s a case to be made that this also happens in the parental brain.”

One of the most exciting discoveries of Conaboy’s trawl through the neuroscience is the finding that everyone who commits to parenthood is changed by it on a neuro-biological level — dads and non-gestational parents too. As any parent knows, babies are acutely powerful stimuli. “With their newborn smell, their tiny fingers, their coos, and their never-ending needs,” says Conaboy.

And this, she says, is so our parental brains can go to work — paying attention to our baby, trying and trying to meet its needs and, if we don’t, adjusting our approach. 

“It’s thought all parents experience these [brain] shifts — dads and others too. They arrive at a pretty similar place, around motivation and brain regions driving us to pay attention, and increased social cognition — understanding what our child needs. So experience matters — and time and attention are what really shape the parental brain.”

Conaboy refers to the work of researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who found the more time a father spent caring for his child, the greater the connection between two brain regions thought to facilitate better detection of social cues.

One researcher she “interviewed a bunch” for her book, is Helena Rutherford, who leads the Yale Child Study Center’s Before and After Baby Lab, which studies the transition to parenthood. Rutherford suggests emotional regulation happens differently in parenthood than in any other life context. And she says our capacity to self-regulate — while at the same time paying attention and addressing our child’s need — may, over time, become more habitual.

This building up of our self-regulating muscle is essential for parents, says Conaboy. “Because the stakes are so high, and our children are changing so quickly. Early on, we learn to regulate our emotions in the face of a crying infant. By doing so, we’re building a skill, enabling us to eventually deal with a toddler throwing a tantrum — or a teenager’s challenging mood and behaviour.”

Attachment is not always instant

Mother Brain does parents a big favour by exploding the concept of ‘maternal instinct’. “There’s this idea your baby is put on your chest and you’re flooded with oxytocin and that’s what will carry you through. For some it feels like that, for others it doesn’t.”

In her book, Conaboy refers to studies that examined first-time mothers’ frame of mind at birth — the researchers found that while mothers expected to feel ‘pure affection’, they instead felt guilt over the sudden weight of responsibility. One study of 112 first-time mums, interviewed a week after birth, reported that 40% felt ‘indifference’ the first time they held their baby.

The idea we arrive at motherhood with everything we need to do the job, that maternal instinct will switch on and it’s innate and automatic, can be damaging.

“It shuts down discourse about the hard parts of this transition. 

We don’t talk about all the ways we might struggle because we fear being a bad mother, or being thought of that way, or that we’ve somehow failed to perform something that should be so intrinsic to who we are.

Whereas, the reality, says Conaboy, is that capacity for caregiving is developed within us. 

“And it keeps developing and changing as our children grow and change. It’s really important for new parents to understand this so they can give themselves the time to be patient with themselves — they’re not supposed to know what to do at first and they need support in those early days and months.”

Conaboy also challenges the notion that our brain power is somehow compromised by motherhood. 

“There’s the idea of the frazzled mother — the forgetfulness. And it’s not to say we’re not sometimes like that. But research suggests there are ways motherhood heightens cognition — because with it comes the ability to see people differently, connect with them differently, understand the social context around us in new ways.”

She cites a University of Southern California study that analysed data on 303,196 people, mostly in their 50s and 60s, comparing the number of children participants had and their performance on two cognitive tests. Parenthood was associated with faster response times and fewer errors in memory.

'I hope the book feels validating to people — that they’ll see themselves in it.'

The researchers also took data from a smaller group — 13,584 people — and analysed their brain age relative to peers. They found parenthood was linked with younger-looking brains. 

Conaboy says the “life-time of cognitive and social demands”, which parents experience, may well result in “a kind of enrichment that has a protective neural effect in later life”.

Be patient with yourself

Conaboy says her book doesn’t offer advice about how to care for your child or about what kind of parent to be. It won’t answer any of the questions that regularly come up in your Google search history — about sleep or childcare or how to get your preschooler to put on his boots without anyone in the room losing their cool.

“I hope the book feels validating to people — that they’ll see themselves in it. I hope it helps them to think about what they can do to shift the conversation, to change how we talk about the individual experience of parenting, so we can be more open and honest about the challenging parts.”

Now mum to two children — Hartley, seven, and Ashley, five — Conaboy can see herself continually growing as a parent. “I really believe in parental intuition — a heightened capacity to pay attention to my children, read their cues, and understand what they might need.”

But she admits that on most days, this isn’t simple or easy. Right now, Hartley’s looking for some independence with getting himself ready in the mornings — he wants to know how the day’s going to go, so he can be ready for it.

“With kids his age, desire can come out as frustration. Then I have to figure out what he needs — which is more space and autonomy,” says Conaboy, adding that she needs to think about her own slowness to give him that independence. “It’s because I’m anxious about his safety and wellbeing and vigilant that he has everything he needs.

“But knowing I have the capacity — that I’m changing all the time as the kids change — helps me give myself a bit of grace and be patient with myself as a parent.”