Brain research on new moms and dads has opened a window into what is going on in your partner's and your brains as you become parents. With the experiences of many new parents to draw upon, here are a few things both of you will want to understand about each other.
BTW, these illustrations do not reflect the actual regions of your brains; they just indicate what rookie moms and dads feel is on their minds.
(click to enlarge)
This 2014 study scanned the brains of new mothers taking “primary care” of their babies, and new fathers taking “secondary care” as they watched videos of themselves with their infants. Their brain scans tracked activation in two “parental caregiving” neural networks:
- An emotional processing network associated with vigilance, reward, intuition, and motivation, with immediate fight-or-flight responses.
- A cognitive thinking network associated with social understanding, empathy, future planning, social goal interpretation, and prediction.
When brain responses were measured, the mothers (see chart) showed an eight-times greater signal change in their emotional processing network over fathers, who in turn showed a 2.3-times greater signal change in their cognitive thinking network over mothers.
This indicates why mothers are vigilant, tuned in to their babies’ needs, and emotionally rewarded in their care of their babies, and fathers are more relaxed and think and plan for the bigger picture. Mothers and fathers' brains complement each other in the raising of infants, or conflict with each other, depending upon how you two react.
Rookie moms take off like a rocket headed to the moon; rookie dads are more like a B-52, which needs a lot of runway to get off the ground but carries a heavy payload.
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