HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind, and I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Chelsea Conaboy.

She's the author of the book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting The Story of Parenthood.

Welcome, Chelsea.

CONABOY: Thanks so much for having me.

HEFFNER: Our pleasure.

What inspired you to write this book?

You've had a really accomplished career across journalism, covering science the Boston Marathon bombing, of course.

But when did the spark go off to write this particular book?

CONABOY: It really started when my first son was born in 2015.

And I was ready to have a baby.

I was financially stable.

I had a great partner.

As you say, I was a health and science journalist.

I had read all the books and gone to the prenatal classes and everything, and still, I was really overwhelmed with the experience of new motherhood.

I was really anxious and worried about my child's wellbeing and also worried about the worry.

I wondered if it was sort of a sign that something was broken or missing in me as a new parent.

And because information is really my coping mechanism, I went down the rabbit hole of researching, reading the research on maternal anxiety, which I learned about how the brain is changing in new parenthood in ways that can make us feel more anxious and more hypervigilant.

And that led me to the broader point that our brains change.

The new parenthood is really this distinct developmental stage, and that was completely missing from my prenatal education.

And at that time, I think from really the broader cultural conversation around parenthood.

HEFFNER: That's fascinating.

And I understand that from reading your introduction to the book, it's often said that it's more difficult for adults to learn a foreign language.

What you're teaching us and what your book has introduced in this whole arena of literature is the idea that by having a child, you're going back to school in effect, you are rewiring your brain in certain ways.

Can you explain that?

CONABOY: Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

So there's one researcher that I love whose name is Darby Saxbe.

She does a lot of work on parents, but also sort of has a focus on fathers.

And she says that she, she says this every, every chance she gets that becoming a parent is a learning process, and it takes time and experience.

And I think one thing that's really important to know about new parenthood is it's a time of really intense neuroplasticity.

So we used to think that the brain kind of stopped changing after adolescence, and then we realized, oh no, that period of neuroplasticity plasticity extends into early adulthood, that teenagers are changing for much longer.

And then we realized, actually neuroplasticity, the way that our brain can change at the level of the synapse and receptors and even structurally, that, lasts over our whole life.

And that really shifted how our understanding of the brain, and now with this research of the parental brain, we see that because of the really intense hormonal changes that happen during pregnancy and after, and because of the really intense experience of caring for a baby who is a really powerful stimuli for the brain that this time perhaps has the highest degree of any point in our adult life potentially.

HEFFNER: What is the percent of environmental change versus biological change?

In other words, how much are father's brains changing too?

CONABOY: So yeah, the book is called Mother Brain, but it's really about parenthood more broadly.

I talk a lot about how this is not specific to females, you know, it is really a process that happens across parents with all people who are engaged in caregiving.

The science is pretty young, and we have a lot to learn.

The research to date has focused pretty intensely on gestational parents.

But there is some really fascinating work that's are been published and is coming in fathers that shows that we have that fathers experience both hormonal changes and experience-based changes.

That there are changes in both, like activity and connectivity in father's brains and also in structure volume changes across areas, particularly related to social cognition.

So one of the big messages of the book is that experience matters that it's a process.

And another one is that really it happens in anyone for anyone who is fully engaged in their attention and their energy in childbearing.

HEFFNER: In your reporting, which was very much focused on news events and public policy emanating from daily news stories that you were writing or reading.

I wonder you thought about whether this was creating parenthood, mother, brain, father brain, or one or the other, they were creating a gateway or a pathway for greater compassion and maybe empathy that can be channeled in the household, but also more broadly?

CONABOY: It's something I love to about.

It's not at all really grounded in the science yet, meaning we don't have the science that says here's how the structure or function of your brain changes in parenthood, and here is how it increases your compassion in some measurable way.

Right?

But I think a lot of people just anecdotally who are parents would tell you that this role requires you to extend your attention and your care beyond yourself in a way that you, you haven't in the same way previously.

And there is this really fascinating piece of the research thread and the research that talks about how we have these brain circuits that are self-referential.

They are like the circuits that help us to create the stories and memories that define us, that help us to figure out who we are and how we exist in the world, and to use those to predict what's going to happen in our future and how we might respond to them.

And these brain networks from the research that we have so far are, are changed by parenthood.

And one researcher, her name is Winnie Orchard, she's based in Australia, and she told me that it's almost these brain networks are changed in ways that respond kind of uniquely to baby's cues.

And the way she puts it is that like our sense of ourselves is extended out into the world, and now it includes our child.

And I think that there's one kind of closed way to look at that to say, okay, now, my sense of myself includes my child and I'm going to protect them against the rest of the world.

And there has been some research that has found that becoming a parent can make us more afraid of the other and more protective or more defensive against other people who are not like us.

But there are other researchers who talk about like the caregiving model in our brain as something that can bridge divides, right?

That that can actually connect us to other caregivers, other parents in the world who, you know, and, and help us to, to like that that basically becomes like another thread of our compassion, right?

That we see other parents and we know how they feel.

And I think that that's really powerful, that it can be something that if we like tap into is, is a really interesting and just powerful way to see other people.

HEFFNER: What about the unknowing of who your child will be?

I don't know if that was the source of your particular anxiety that you identify on the air with me now and also in the book, but that seems to be a pretty streamlined and constant concern that if we do believe nature and nurture are both impactful and there is that synergy that defines who your kid or child will be.

But many of us probably think, at least I do, that it's a flip of a coin, whether it's 75% nature and 25% nurture.

CONABOY: Or you can't really separate those things anyway.

HEFFNER: Or you don't ultimately choose to have a child or your, your anxiety is heightened by the fact that you think that it could be 90% nature and 10% nurture, and you think that nurture is going to be more integral in making the person helping raise a child, that is going to share your values.

Certainly there are teachable moments from children to parents too, but how much of that, that motif that theme Yeah.

Of the unknowing of who your child will be surfaced in the scientific conversations?

CONABOY: So I like the last point that you made of how children teach parents also.

And I honestly, the nature versus nurture how child development unfolds, I'll leave that to other people to answer.

I really like explicitly in this book stayed away from child development as much as I could because there is so much information out there about how parents shape child development and what that and the different ways that that can go.

I'm kind of more interested in this project at least in how children shape parents.

And one thing that is becoming clearer in the research is that your brain really is.

there is not this like maternal or, or parental circuitry that's sort of ready-made and just kind of clicks on in your brain, right?

So it's something that grows and develops in you, and it grows, it changes, it grows in response to your actual child, right?

So your baby comes with like agency, and their own genetics and their own.

So there are, there are pieces in place already.

And, and so that the way they behave even from early infancy helps you, shapes you and shapes your brain into hopefully who your child needs you to be.

So one example is that there are some researchers, and these are still small studies that need to be replicated and expanded upon, but there's a study that looks at the brains of parents who had babies in the NICU who were preterm relatively healthy, but were preterm.

They did brain imaging of those mothers and compared it to brain imaging of mothers who had babies at full term.

And they found that there was heightened activity in brain regions related to trying to read and respond to another person's emotions and social cues in the NICU mothers.

And researchers said that this might be like essentially the brain responding to the reduced cues that they were getting from their babies and the brain essentially like working harder to read them and respond to them.

And so I think there is this sense that it's a two-way street that we shape our baby's brains and they shape our own.

And I find a lot of comfort in that, honestly, for exactly the point that you're talking about of like, who we don't know who our children are going to be.

We don't know what the exactly they're going to need from us in terms of their social and emotional development and their physical needs and whatever it may be.

But I have two very different kids, and I have taken a lot of comfort in the idea that I am growing in ways that support them, that support who they are.

And I just sort of need to like, turn to them and look at them and do my best to meet them where they are.

And it's going to be hard, but I also am adapting, and I have like this flexibility in my brain that will help me grow toward them.

HEFFNER: As a non-parent, this is very instructive and perhaps a preview of things to come.

What would you say was the most profound change if you could qualify it?

You described just now in your adaptability.

If there were more profound neurological changes that you've experienced that you think will carry through parenthood, and you're always a parent, but carry through the developmental stage of your children when they graduate college, if they graduate college, or get their first job... CONABOY: Yeah.

It's a great question.

So just to start with sort of a caveat is that the research we have to date is, again, it's still a young field.

It really stops after the immediate postpartum period.

There are a couple of studies that look a little farther out from that, but there's like a whole middle life section that has been almost completely unstudied.

I think it's wild that we haven't studied the role of parenthood in shaping the adult brain.

It's really ripe for research.

But I will say we do have a few studies that look at the brains of parents in much later life.

So there are studies in from out of Europe and in Australia that take these big data banks of brain imaging.

I'm talking tens of thousands of people, and they compare the brains of parents and non-parents and use computer modeling to look at lots of data points in each brain.

And the researchers have found that parents' brains are what the researchers themselves call younger looking.

So they think that there is like a neuroprotective effect potentially of parenting, which makes sense if you think of it, because children provide intense social and emotional challenges over a long period of your life.

If you have multiple children, they have different challenges and you have to rise to meet them in different ways.

And so it's thought that there is this like protective factor that it's a kind of like enrichment for your brain, which is not to say that like parenting is the only enrichment at that level, but it is one.

And that I love those studies because it's such a strong counterpoint to this idea of mommy brain that women in particular are compromised by pregnancy and motherhood that we become these forgetful, frazzled, less competent people.

And while there are certainly struggles in it, and it's important to like, acknowledge and support people through those struggles, it's just not true.

HEFFNER: Do you think the science has not been pursued because it would just be too difficult as there are other formative stages both within parenthood or childhood to which you could attribute those same biological or interpersonal changes, and of course, a lot of non-childhood or parenthood events, being promoted, being fired, the entire world of your professional life, which is all-consuming in the United States.

But is that why you think it hasn't been done in terms of capturing how the mother brain or father brain evolves beyond that initial period?

CONABOY: We have more science on sports psychology and the effects of gambling on the brain than we do have on the effects of parenting on the brain, or the connection between parents' brains and children's brains, the most fundamental relationship in our lives.

And we are only just beginning to understand it.

I think there's a few reasons for that.

One is a lot of this work is done by MRII and FMRI, which are technologies that have advanced and gotten more become more advanced I would say in the last 20 to 30 years.

So we're using those now and building this body of research.

But again, we have even within the brain imaging much more in other area, much more work done in other areas that might be less consequential to the broader population.

I think that parenting and mother motherhood in particular has not for a long time been deemed worthy of study.

And I think we know it's been underfunded in, in lots of different ways, not just in the brain, but also study of postpartum depression and other mood and anxiety disorders clinical care of around pregnancy.

Like there are these things that we're playing catch up on because it hasn't been deemed worth studying.

And I argue in the book also because we've had this narrative around maternal instinct, this idea that mothers are natural nurturing people that we're kind of made to be mothers.

It's already innate in us.

And so we've have in many ways carried forward what are like these religious and moral ideas about what a mother is.

And I think that's really been an obstacle to getting at the truth of this of how we are, how we develop and grow into parents and who can do it, right, whose biology equips them or opens the door for them to become caregivers.

And that's really something that's true for all human adults.

HEFFNER: And now that you have been a parent to two young people beyond the period that's been studied, what are you most curious about studying?

CONABOY: Oh my gosh.

HEFFNER: In terms of their impact on you, I suppose, and your impact on them as well- CONABOY: I am very interested in the question of what it means to have multiple kids, even in early postpartum period.

We don't have a lot of research on that.

Like what, how does the brain respond to the demands of multiple children at once and how does that change over time?

Having one kid is one thing, and it's a really transformative experience.

I don't know how much you know about like Attachment Theory.

It's this theory that really has shaped so much of what we understand about child development, and it also has these huge implications for our social policies and clinical care and education, and it really studies a mother and a baby in space and doesn't really account for other relationships.

And so I'm really interested in like what happens when you're having to split your attention and also when you start factoring all in those societal pieces too, in terms of financial stability and other relationships and violence and climate change and racism, but also resiliency factors, you know there's just, honestly, there's so much more to learn.

I guess from just like a personal perspective, think that we're kind of a long ways away from this research, but I'm interested in creativity and you know, we have a lot of research around creativity, but not within the context of parenting.

But Alison Gopnik is a famous child development specialist and psychologist, and she calls kids, I think her phrase is something like the blue sky thinkers.

They are the R and D of our society and coming up with the new ideas.

And I think that is so true.

And I wonder about what happens when my brain has changed in ways that make me better able to connect with those blue sky thinkers.

I'm more closely able to connect with my children.

How does that then influence my own sense of the world and creativity?

HEFFNER: I'm interested in your reaction about more than one child.

I would be interested in that question, too, because of the fact that usually, I think in most cases, at least anecdotally, your two kids don't have identical personalities.

They are different, and how that balance can be helpful.

If you only have one child, your brain is going to respond only to the stimuli you're seeing mm-hmm that are ultimately derived from their behavior and personality.

You have two children, then it creates a more complex but potentially balanced picture and maybe healthier chemical reactions going on here.

CONABOY: So, two things.

HEFFNER: Once you get through it.

CONABOY: Two things I want to say about that one.

One is the initial transition to parenthood is especially intense.

And the research seems to indicate that like we go through these pretty massive changes and the kind of basic architecture of our brain around caregiving is changed.

And that the thought is that many of those changes last, and one reason they last is that we might do it again, right?

So we are that parental brain.

Some pieces of it anyways will kind of be in place and ready for the children who come.

But a very important factor in the parental brain in general is a very important characteristic of it is flexibility.

That what we're learning to do is to fine tune our capacity to read another person's emotions and mental states and needs and respond to them, and also regulate our own emotions in the process.

And so that is like a very flexible thing.

It's a skill that can change and adjust I guess according to your child.

I will say I feel that in my own parenting.

I have two very different kids.

When my second child came along, I really felt myself learning things from him that were different than what I learned from my first kid and then applying them to my parenting in general.

So I really felt that flexibility and every family is different, but for me, what you say is certainly true.

The kind of like balancing of needs and, and characteristics and what they've taught me.

HEFFNER: Chelsea, we're about out of time.

One final question.

CONABOY: Yeah.

HEFFNER: How were your views at all changed about public policy?

So, and, and do expound on this because it's important.

You and I have both come from a journalistic background.

How did, did your mother brain alter your views on any significant public policy issues?

CONABOY: Oh, entirely all of them really.

HEFFNER: Take the time you need because you need to answer that with as much specificity as possible.

CONABOY: Okay.

So let me say, I was a working full-time as a newspaper journalist when my first son was born.

I had 12 weeks of paid leave.

I thought that was pretty good.

And I look back on that now and realize it wasn't enough.

And not only that, but you know, the United States is one of six countries in the world that don't have a federally mandated paid leave program.

Some of those other six or other five are countries you can't see on the map because they're small island nations.

All of our peer countries have, in terms of income, GDP, have paid leave programs and not 12 weeks.

I'm talking 24 weeks or more, and that's because it makes sense to have that.

It makes sense for families to have as healthy a possible as possible transition.

HEFFNER: Author of Mother Brain, Chelsea Conaboy, thank you so much for your time today.

CONABOY: Thank you for your interest and your time.

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