To be annoyed by “Brain re-wired during pregnancy and motherhood” campaigns

[Kouklamo]

I have been seeing a lot of people chatting about how “women’s brains are re-wired during pregnancy” to prepare for motherhood. The implication being this doesn’t happen for dads. It is really irritating me.

Everything you do re-wires your brain. If you learn chess, if you eat junk food, if you learn an instrument, if you fall in love, if you learn to drive a car. It’s literally how your brain works. There are even studies showing fatherhood re-wires your brain.

All this talk about how women’s brains are re-wired during pregnancy and motherhood just feels like it’s a) bad science and b) will be used to reinforce the idea that women are the default parent an should just know what to do magically when a baby arrives, should be able to deal with the exhaustion and the screaming better and therefore should be the “default” parent to do it all.

I don’t know about anyone else but when my daughter was born I didn’t have a clue, I learnt how to look after her just like her dad did. I got tired like her dad did, I found it wonderful and hard and muddled along like all new parents (mums and dads alike!). I also
passed exams and worked and was perfectly capable of using my brain just as I had before I had her.

This is not a helpful narrative and will be just used as yet another stick to beat mums with. Oh we can’t promote a new mum her brain has been dulled by motherhood. Now maybe the nauance of the science doesn’t say that. But since when do people care about nuance when they criticise women. No one says it explicitly but we all know it’s hard enough for mums to be taken seriously in the workplace and in life and this won’t help.

TLDR: Everything you do “re-wires” your brain. To make a big deal about women’s brains being re-wired during motherhood is just another way to make mums “default” parent and take women less seriously.

There was research being reported a couple of weeks ago that showed brain scans of women going through pregnancy and there were definite changes happening that aren't seen normally.
BBC News - Pregnant women's brains shed grey matter to prime them for motherhood, study suggests - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0d59e7wjlo?app-referrer=deep-link

Everything rewires a brain and it’s highly likely that the female hormones and pregnancy hormones have an impact that men don’t get

thats biology
and it’s probably why men find it easier to walk away from their kids

accepting biology isn’t the same as accepting that women are lesser than men because of their biology

We are changed by pregnancy though.
fetal microchimerism for a start. Fathers don't get that.

I don't think its a good thing to try to deny or dismiss all the changes that happen to a woman as a result of pregnancy or act like they are a bad thing.

The issue with accepting this research lock, stock and barrel is that it will have a detrimental effect on women's careers. Employers will think "Oh, baby brain, that's it then. Waste of time promoting her if her brain's gone to mush".

This is what I think. It won’t be empowering it will be used to just put women back in their biological “box”

What the real science says is interesting but it is going to be used against women.

Fathers are changed by parenthood though. There are studies about that if you google it.

Anything you do re-wires your brain

I find it annoying too.

I don't think it is bad science to say women's brains are quite radically changed during pregnancy; it's fascinating. This deserves to be studied and is really important.

However, I am cynical too, and I think it's so easy to misuse this research by suggesting either that men's brains can't be reshaped so they can't help being crap parents, or by totally failing to provide women with support and understanding.

We know men's brains change the more they take care of their children.

I've got to say, I also found it a slap in the face every time someone told me how 'motherhood' changes your brain because of pregnancy, or how fascinating it is for 'mothers' that their babies are always part of their bodies at a cellular level. I adore my daughter, but she isn't biologically mine, and I am fed up to the back teeth with sentimental 'oooh, but there is a special and different bond you have when they are really yours!' nonsense.

This is an excellent way of putting it. And not that I'm saying the mother should be the default parent at all, but with babies there's a lot of stuff that's instinctual for a mother and obviously the father isn't going to have those instincts.

Also: I can guarantee if the headline research was 'biological fathers' brains are radically changed when they become parents' then we would be seeing all sorts of initiatives to support fathers at this time.

We don't even see proper support for biological mothers when they are recovering from c-sections.

Let's maybe get priorities straight.

Agreed! I suspect your brain has been re-wired to be in tune with your daughter more than anyone who has been pregnant and then give up the baby and had nothing to do with it after.

Because ultimately anything we do re-wires our brain.

I honestly believe this is utter bullshit.

I think men can walk away from their babies because society programs them to believe they are pretty important, and it's ok for them to do this.

If men were socialised the same way as women, and if men were expected to be the 'buck stops here' parent the way women are, they would not find it easy to walk away.

I wonder if they did brain scans of random women they could tell who had children and who didn’t.

I bet they couldn’t!

I think they can. I think it is a really radical reshaping of the brain.

I am repeating myself, but I think it's really important, this stuff.

Pregnancy has huge effects on us. In a better world we would acknowledge that, but we would do so in a way that didn't lead to women being more penalised for being women/having children.

I’m very cynical about it tbh. I can guess if you have a before and after picture of a brain it would look different after a massive thing like pregnancy and childbirth.

I reckon you wouldn’t be able to pick out the random brain scans of the mothers from a load of control women who didn’t have children though.

I am also cynical because people have shown massive reorganisation of their brain from eating junk food or learning to play chess really well

They are not the same.

I gave birth twice.

I had cbt to deal with a needle phobia.

You could argue both 'rewired' my brain, and you would be right. I can certainly now cope with needles, which is great, but only one of them involved physical, chemical, hormonal, biological, whatever changes generated from within my body as part of growing a human being in it.

The changes that happen within our bodies are important. They matter and they shouldn't be treated dismissively.

Men do not go through what women go through because they don't grow a person inside them and they don't go through the changes that happen as a direct result of that.

Everything a man experiences as a result of becoming a parent a woman also experiences plus the woman goes through pregnancy and birth.

These things are not equal.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fetal-cells-microchimerism/

Mum's brain is re-wired via hormones. Womens' bodies go through a second puberty.

Dad's brain is re-wired in a different way.

Having a tiny little person who depends entirely on you changes you.