How Parents' Brains Get Rewired And Why Knowing It Is Important

Parents, especially mothers, know it instinctively. The instant that tiny, wrinkled, wriggly thing the world calls your baby is in your hands, you change. Or, to use another motherhood cliché, ‘everything changes’. Now science is backing this gut feeling and telling parents (in a nice way) that babies make them go somewhat nuts.

A few months ago this story was published where neurologists discussed how pregnancy “tinkers with the very structure of the brain”. It is only now that science is beginning to link the way a mother acts to what is happening in her brain – her grey matter becomes more concentrated and activity heightens in regions that control anxiety, social interaction and empathy. In essence, neurologists are concluding that all the overwhelming emotional changes a new mother experiences are, well, neurological.

Last week, researchers from the University of Georgia further substantiated this theory that becoming a parent “rewires the parents' brain”. The Nature study finds that neuropeptides, which influences behaviours such as aggression, social tolerance and feeding, undergoes major changes during parenting.

The scientists were testing the idea that genetic changes occur over a period to develop ‘parental qualities’ in a species. With this study, they are theorising that behaviours connected with parenting arise from changes in existing genes rather than evolution of new ones.

This is an important development because mapping parental brains is only the first step in fine-tuning our knowledge of something as complicated as raising children. Crucially, this might also help in a better understanding of post-partum depression and anxiety neurosis in new mothers, a subject mired in political correctness and lack of empathy. What’s worse, it is an area that sorely lacks large-scale research.