"We already know enough to act, to do better"

A conversation with Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain

Holt / out now!

When I first received a copy of Chelsea Conaboy’s book Mother Brain, I was skeptical. This had nothing to do with Chelsea or her writing. I hadn’t even cracked the book yet. But I am often suspicious of neurobiological approaches to the subject of motherhood or women’s bodies because there is a long legacy of misogyny and racism in the study of feelings, psychology, and the brain. And there is no control group for living in a patriarchy, which of course changes our brains in ways many have measured, only to then point and say “look, it’s natural!”

When I opened Chelsea’s book, however, I was so glad I set aside my own frustrated, reactionary assumptions. I learned so much.

The research Chelsea presents in her book is not only illuminating, but also rooted in a keen, thorough, and thoughtful awareness of how brain science and psychology have long projected patriarchal narratives on to their findings— and why the current research is still compelling, crucial, and worthy of our sustained collective attention. The research clearly confirms what many feminists have known for a long time: that mothering is a never-ending labor, a process, a transformation, and a verb open to all genders.

Image c/o the author

Mother Brain does much more than prove mothers’ neurocognitive capacities are just fine thank you, and that caregivers’ brains actually function in highly skilled, specialized ways. This of course opens up other questions: do we risk naturalizing the assault of parenting in this country and contemporary era, glorifying our brains’ plasticity in the face of trauma, exhaustion, control, and overwhelm? Chelsea pursues these and many other nuanced, complex questions in the book and in our conversation below.

Her book is inclusive, technical, and precise, but also accessible and impossible to put down. She wades right into the muddy waters of the ol’ nature versus nurture and clarifies the mess we find there. As Chelsea says in the book and in our conversation, we already know more than enough to act— to better support parents and understand clearly why no one should ever be forced into pregnancy and parenthood. But there is also much more to learn about the nuances of the parental brain, the postpartum period, and how care by extended family and in community is crucial to both parents’ and children’s development.

Mother Brain has the potential to reignite conversations about paid parental leave, equitable labor divisions in the home, stronger social supports for new parents, and less isolated, more community-oriented models of care. (And already has, judging by the response to a recently published excerpt from the book, about maternal instinct.) Mother Brain is out now, and it’s necessary reading for anyone who cares about care, especially those interest in de-gendering child rearing, which yeah, should be all of us.

You can learn more about the book at Chelsea’s website. She is also signing books purchased through Print until Thursday, so pop over there to get a signed copy, then come back to read our conversation about alloparenting, how maternal ambivalence contributes to human sociality, why Chelsea doesn’t use the term “maternal bonding,” hormones as rhetoric, and what those in power have to learn from the brain on care.

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You state in your book that a parent’s brain is fundamentally different from that of a non-parent because the brain is reshaped in response to the cognitive and social demands of caring for a child. Toward the end of the book, you also mention that feminist thought has often shied away from exploring these neurobiological changes. In the latter half of the last century, critiques of biological essentialism were predominant, but lately, in this era of post-Roe forced parenthood and the criminalization of pregnancy, many feminists are again articulating how carrying and birthing children forever alters one’s body, psyche, professional prospects, every aspect of life. As you say in the book, a person’s physical and mental health— over the span of their entire lifetime— is shaped by their reproductive history. Can you talk about some of the stakes and dangers involved in taking the neurobiological approach to parenting at this moment?

First, I think there’s a real risk in this research being used to reinforce the old storyline about motherhood, to reaffirm the notion of an automatic, innate maternal instinct, rather than offering a new story. One of the researchers I interviewed told me that, after she published a paper that got a lot of attention, anti-abortion advocates wrote to her to say they were encouraged by her work, because it shows that essentially once you’re pregnant, you’re transformed into a mother. She didn’t see it that way, and neither do I. And the science doesn’t support that idea. It’s not automatic. Developing a parental brain is a process that unfolds over time, it requires an immense amount of support to go well, and it is an incredibly adaptive process that also carries with it profound risks. 

There’s a real risk in ignoring this biology, too. It’s basically absent from prenatal education today, and so many of us are blindsided by how deep and profound this change is. The parental brain—and specifically the maternal brain—has been sort of an untouchable topic for a long time, for reasons like the example above and because it was as if acknowledging the maternal brain at all would mean acknowledging that we are compromised by motherhood. The idea of the forgetful “mommy brain” is so ingrained in us. Lots of us experience it to some degree. But it is really just one part of a much bigger story about how we are changed by parenthood. In fact, new parenthood may be a period of cognitive enrichment. That’s something that researchers are just really starting to measure and quantify.

And, I worried as I was starting this project—maybe unnecessarily—that looking at the normative brain changes that accompany parenthood would somehow undermine the progress that we’ve made in raising awareness about perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. If we really acknowledge that all parents’ brains change, would that make people who struggle feel like their struggle matters less, or isn’t significant enough to seek treatment? What I hope, instead, is that talking about this as a major upheaval for the brain, and one that almost always includes some degree of distress, will help reduce stigma so that more people can get the support they need before they are in crisis. 

One of the most compelling sections in the book for me was your discussion of research on postpartum depression, which you acknowledge is a “‘garbage bag’ term” (a phrase you borrow from a researcher), under which many heterogeneous and understudied postpartum symptoms are thrown. Better research, you argue, could help us prevent and treat perinatal mood and anxiety disorders without relying exclusively “on the whims of politicians or on solving the most intractable societal problems.” Of course, there is also much to be said for how such whims and problems create what we in turn pathologize as postpartum disorders or what turn up in research as neurobiological changes. It can become a sort of chicken and egg debate ad infinitum: what came first, the brain changes or the whims and problems?

What came first, the maternal mental health crisis or the politicians who turned a blind-eye to the real needs of young families?

We absolutely need more and better science to understand the development of the parental brain and the various mechanisms that underlie perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and hopefully to influence policy-making.  One thing I say repeatedly in the book is that we need that research, and we already know enough to act, to do better for new parents. 

We know that the U.S. maternity care system needs more providers, particularly midwives and doulas and public health nurses who can bridge the care that is provided in the hospital and the needs of a family at home. We know that a federal paid parental leave program would help many more families get a better start. We can do more to educate expectant parents about the risk factors for postpartum depression, to help them connect with support before they are in crisis and to further reduce the stigma that prevents some from getting help when they need it. The research will continue to help bolster these efforts, but there’s more than adequate evidence to support them now. 

You acknowledge throughout your book that environmental factors also shape the brain. Many factors contribute, for instance, to a parent’s ability to manage stress: from previous psychological and sexual trauma to poverty and racism; then there’s loss of sleep and lack of parental leave, as you mention above, which can exacerbate and even affirm gendered divisions in the home. I was really interested in what you say about addiction and the parental brain too—a legacy that runs through my own genetic and familial history and haunts my motherhood story. You write so thoughtfully about how heavy and deterministic and disempowering our past and present histories can make us feel as parents—we can feel as if our genetics or biology determine our fate, or we feel as if the political and social climate does the same. How has studying the parental brain helped you move toward an understanding that parenthood is not, as you say, “this glittering gemstone that's been sitting there in its place all along,” but rather is a process or practice formed within us “through heat and pressure and time”? (A gorgeous line from the book that will stay with me forever!)

It’s made me much more patient with myself as a parent. Letting go of the myth of maternal instinct can be scary—it’s a comforting idea, that a switch flips and we become maternal, that we will just know how to do this. But rejecting that idea can also be freeing. When I struggled in my early months as a mother, I worried that something was broken in me. Or missing. Now I really recognize how I am growing and developing as a parent, and how that distress at the beginning was, to a large degree, a part of the process. 

It’s helped me take a more honest accounting of what I bring to my role as a parent, the strengths and challenges I had going into this, and how they’ve changed since my children were born. I’m much more conscious of how I’m changing along with my kids—how they are changing me. And that’s a beautiful thing.

In one chapter, titled “The Ancient Family Tree,” you write that most popular thinking about parenthood comes from observations made by “male scientists of yore” who projected moral judgments onto their conclusions—for example, naturalists who selectively studied maternal animal behavior that appeared self-sacrificial or otherwise confirmed preexisting patriarchal characterizations of women and mothers. “But what about the many examples, across taxa, of mothers who eat or abandon their children,” you ask, “or simply have little involvement in rearing them?” And what of those species in which males are primary or intimate caregivers, you also ask, including primates, who share care duties across gender? The research you present in the book shows not only that care patterns are as flexible and diverse as our brains, but also that fathers, relatives, neighbors, and grandparents have always played important roles in raising children— and that “human mothers couldn’t, and most often didn’t, do it alone.” Can you talk about how “alloparenting” comes up in your book and how it supports this conclusion?

Human babies have never been raised in isolation, within a mother-baby dyad. That’s never been the human way. Early human mothers diverged from their primate ancestors by having babies close together, which meant that they had to rely on other adults to help care for their children. The work of anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and colleagues suggests that those other adults were often grandmothers. Helpful grandmothers may have propelled alloparenting in humans, so that adults’ attention and motivation were easily captured by babies, and babies were really good at the catch. 

The New York Times recently ran an adapted excerpt from Mother Brain about how the notion of a maternal instinct as something innate, automatic and distinctly female was written into science by men, based on religious ideals. It’s a myth. Lots of critical comments on social media suggested I watch some nature shows to see just how real maternal instinct is. Funny, because I’ve watched them ALL! My animal-obsessed kids are 5 and 7. And I deeply understand the neurobiological changes that can make a mother fiercely protective of her babies. There’s a whole chapter on this point in the book. 

But the reality is that our popular understanding of the natural world was shaped by the same ideas about sex and gender—females as selfless nurturers and males as fierce competitors—that shaped our narrative around human motherhood. In reality, across mammalian species, there is variation in parental caregiving. And it’s thought that the fundamental neural circuitry that enables caregiving is shared, to some degree, across species and within them, and regulated differently depending on the context. That’s why male rats demonstrate “maternal” behavior toward pups when given exposure to them, even though they wouldn’t be involved in rearing pups in the wild. That’s why new research continues to be published documenting how human fathers’ brains change with time spent parenting, particularly brain regions involved in reading and responding to other people’s social cues.

You also note that “alloparenting” may be one root of maternal ambivalence, as it forces mothers to decide what tasks to outsource and what they will do themselves (should I bring the baby with me while I complete this task or ask someone to hold the child?). This is fascinating and makes so much sense to me! It also shows that maternal ambivalence is not a condition of women entering the workforce or some refusal of the “true nature of motherhood introduced by a woman unwilling to attend fully to her biological destiny,” as you say. Rather, ambivalence is a normal aspect of human caregiving, and one that likely shaped human development. Today, so much parenting is done in isolation, with the ideology of the nuclear family frequently rationalized using narratives of men out on the hunt and mothers at home, tending to children alone. But that image of human history, as you note in the book, is patently false. Can you share how raising children in community—and the ambivalence that stirs in parents—benefits children and their caregivers?

So much theorizing about attachment and parenting is based on the study of the mother-infant pair, as if they exist alone in space—no siblings, no extended family, no social pressures. Anyone who has more than one child knows that it is impossible to meet everyone’s needs at the same time, all the time. Or even most of the time—at least not without help. 

In the U.S., we so idealize the nuclear family, and we dramatically under value anyone involved in child rearing who is not a mother, including fathers and other parents, nannies, day care providers, early childhood educators. Thomas Weisner, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at UCLA, told me that in every place that children are raised there are people who are specialized in caring for them, and not only mothers. Babies are prepared to be responsive to the world around them, which might include multiple people caring for them. Rather than being a deviation from some narrow ideal, those multiple caregivers may be essential to a baby learning about culturally relevant social trust. 

The point is that humans exist in community. They always have. For early human babies, mothers mattered a lot. And, in most cases, they were not enough. So babies relied on other adults to care for them, and a mother who was willing to let them. In that way, I like to think of ambivalence as important. Not a character flaw at all. More like the thing that propelled human sociality. 

One of the ways I think we first connected was on the subject of maternal bonding, after I wrote a piece about how the concept had been co-opted by the American Right and the spectacle of the ultrasound in the 1980s, at the height of abortion debates. At that time, we really began to see disciplinary tactics in clinical settings crop up and zoom in on the mother in the prenatal phase. Researchers began exploring how and why pregnant people bond with babies before birth, hoping to control the process and strong arm people into reconsidering abortions. But so much of your work in this book demonstrates that parent-child relationships form through neurobiological—and social—processes that largely happen after birth. What’s your perspective on the notion of “maternal bonding”? It seems quite friendly with the mythological concept of “instinct.” 

I don’t use the phrase “maternal bonding” much because it is loaded. It sounds too much like magic. Or, perhaps, the opposite of magic—formulaic. As if there’s a step by step way to arrive at a very specific feeling of bonding. 

But Mother Brain is, in large part, an exploration of the biological mechanisms that link us, as parents, to our children and help us to know them. There are both social and neurobiological changes that can occur during pregnancy, too. We don’t actually know the precise timeline along which changes to the brain happen, and which changes might begin during pregnancy, partly because of the challenges of studying pregnant people. But, likely that timeline is somewhat different person to person. I guess I would emphasize that it’s a process, one that requires experience and support to unfold, that in some ways never stops, and that can feel really different from family to family. 

On that subject, one thing you highlight repeatedly is that we need better research on parents of all kinds and genders—on adoptive parents, trans parents, queer parents, grandparents. The kind of research that doesn’t by default slot caregivers into “mom” and “dad” roles. You also note that we need a clearer understanding of the research that does exist. For example, you explain that both oxytocin and testosterone are mischaracterized in our cultural narratives as the “love hormone” and “the maker of the male mind,” respectively, but both hormones actually serve much more complex functions. Can you talk briefly about the damage these mischaracterizations have done in terms of how our culture views the division of caregiving labor?

Sari van Anders, a researcher in Canada who studies hormones and social context— her work is fascinating!—told me hormones can be two things. They are the biochemical substances that circulate in our bodies. And, they are the cultural narratives that circulate in our societies. This is “hormones as rhetoric.” 

Both mothers and fathers experience spikes in oxytocin when they interact with their babies. Testosterone in men is thought to decline with fatherhood (though the science on this is a bit messy). So does testosterone in new mothers, after a major spike during pregnancy. In fact, both hormones are part of a broader, complicated neuroendocrine system that, among other things, regulates our orientation toward social bonds. 

Yet, we’ve reduced these hormones into such simple rhetoric that fathers and mothers think they are supposed to behave a certain way—to protect in one case, and to be awash in motherly love in the other—and the reality is just much more nuanced. 

I think a lot about what expectant mothers are told regarding oxytocin, how it will flood you as soon as the baby is put on your chest and it will flood your baby when you nurse and—just like that—the bond is sealed. I think this rhetoric can be really harmful. I don’t deny that it feels like that for some. But the neurobiological changes involved in adapting to parenthood, in building a relationship with a child and moving into this new role are much more complicated than that, and there are many avenues to get there. 

The last thing I want to talk about is one of my favorite parts in the book, where you discuss the power of cuteness, the kind in babies faces, and how it can force people to “expand their moral circle.” Immediately, I thought of all those people in power who have spent very little time exposed to babies and cuteness–and how the history of separating public, political figures from child rearing has clearly had profound effects on our collective “moral circle.” You note that most of the research on parents’ brains begin with questions about pathology, but we rarely begin with questions about how child rearing, as a “cooperative act,” may help us better form bonds with others and break down barriers. What do you hope a clearer, more nuanced articulation of parental brain science can offer us in this time of increasing reproductive control and seemingly relentless national struggle?

First, I hope this science can offer some validation to new parents about what they’ve experienced and support to people who are just beginning this major life transition. 

I hope it can help us to see new parenthood as a new stage of development in our lives, one that requires adequate support, is incredibly powerful, and comes with real risks to our physical and mental health. One that nobody should be forced into. 

I really hope that more men will see themselves in this science and will embrace new fatherhood as a stage of development, maybe even recognize how they have become specialized caregivers, too, through time and attention. How much would change if the people in power saw real value in that?