Human moms do not somehow magically know what they are doing, because experience makes a large difference, as do various environmental and cultural factors, she writes. Instinct is both fixed and flexible, she asserts. Tucker is wedded to the word "instinct" but she does qualify it quite a bit. Of course, adoptive parents already know that parenthood isn't necessarily dependent on biology at all. If hormones prime maternal behaviors and brain changes, what does this mean for adoptive moms? "The evidence we have suggests that choosing to care deeply for a baby can awaken and physically mold the maternal brain," Tucker writes. "Maternal wall bias can manifest in different ways, coming from hiring committees, colleagues, and individuals conducting performance evaluations," reports Science magazine. Maternal wall bias, as it's called, refers to discrimination against working mothers, including new mothers. But it's not just famous women who are the point here many of us moms have managed to work well and to parent well simultaneously, even when work-place and cultural support is unfortunately minimal.Ī view of new mothers as brain-compromised and incompetent isn't a cute meme, it's damaging to women who may have to fight a tide of suspicion about their competence.
Scientists, artists, and business leaders routinely perform their jobs as new moms. Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern led a country as a new mom. Tammy Duckworth gave birth while governing in office. My main complaint here is that brain scans and laboratory tests don't map well onto real-world maternal behavior. Yet she embraces that view in the guise of humor, referring to her new-mom sibling as the "organism formerly known as my little sister." "This idea of being hijacked, hacked, overridden, reprogrammed, or otherwise assigned a new identity is the stuff of dystopian female fiction, from The Stepford Wives to The Handmaid's Tale," Tucker writes. Tucker notes: "If we are wholly intent on the texture of our child's bowel movements, we can't quite put our finger on the quadratic equation." In this suite of transformations lurks trouble for anyone planning to work, or even focus clearly, as a new mother. In the book, she states that moms are people who are "enthralled, in every sense of the word" with their babies, who desire to "do anything at all for your child, at every given moment." Because of this compulsion, it's necessary for moms to "acknowledge our lack of agency," she writes. The alterations were seen when comparing the moms' brains to their very own pre-pregnant brains, as well, changes as extensive as those seen in survivors of traumatic brain injuries.īut Tucker's descriptions of how radically women may change at the time of motherhood - and, as an extention, how this might affect their ability to focus on other things - gets pretty harrowing. One lab found "stark differences and gray matter reductions in the brains of twenty-five first-time moms versus the brains of twenty childless women," Tucker cites. Moms' brains may be structurally different too, she notes. In one study, the prefrontal cortex of moms became active in a different region compared to women who had never been pregnant as they viewed pictures of angry, scared, or happy babies. Infant emotions affect mothers more profoundly than anyone else, Tucker says. And sometimes, sadly, real pathology occurs, as Tucker acknowledges by reporting that the most likely killer of a week-old American baby is that infant's mother.
I wonder: Has Tucker met anyone whose heart just isn't into babies? I have they're just as human as anyone else.
Tucker's argument is not a subtle one: Full stop "babies occupy a special place in the hearts of all men and women, and in our neural circuitry as well." New moms derive intense pleasure from their infant, experience heightened sensitivity to cues and signals coming from the baby, and are overtaken with a need to help and protect the baby at all costs. Hormone and brain-based changes drive this transformation and "make a mother," she writes. When women give birth and become mothers, writes Tucker, who is a science writer and mother of four, they "rebuilt from the ground up" as they undergo a "radical self-revision" that involves "a monomaniacal focus" on the baby.
The theme of transformation is central to Abigail Tucker's Mom Genes. Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct, by Abigail Tucker