Motherhood and biology

[Sosososcared]

I don't have children or a detailed understanding of hormonal effects, so forgive me if I seem ignorant.

It seems to me that the work of raising children is designated as women's work, and that this is presented in our society as correct and proper, as women are supposedly more nurturing and in tune with children's needs.

Is there anything to back this viewpoint up? People seem to point to the biological argument, where a woman carries a baby, breastfeeds it and has the surge of hormones- how much impact does this biological aspect really have? Are you more naturally in tune with your baby as a mother who has just given birth to him or her, or is this a cultural myth?

Apologies for bad wording there! I suppose I'm interested in how much women's biology is used against us to keep us doing the grunt work of childrearing.

For me I don't think I'm naturally any better at childcare but there was initially a natural shift in my relationship to me looking after the baby so OH could do the more physically demanding jobs (bringing in wood, clearing snow, walking 2 big dogs, etc as he has needed too while I was heavily pregnant, we live in rural Sweden so prob not normal jobs in an English city).
This changed back to normal after a couple of months helped by me starting to travel for work so I had to let him do half the childcare and he had to get stuck in.

I am not a better mother than dh is a father. As I stayed home with dd after she was born (on Mat Leave then back to work at eight months), I became more sensitive to her character and her ways of expressing herself. Spending 10 hours a day in a job (plus night shifts) five days a week does sort of imprpve your skills at it

DH is a TA though, so he spends all the holidays with dd while I work so in no time we were each as well trained as the other.

We both work ft and do masses of sole childcare (I do shifts) so we are as equal as its every possible to be. No biology about it - just good ol on the job experience.

A very very interesting question.

I think it would be hard to measure because of the nature/nurture issue.

Certainly there is some evidence around hormones immediately after giving birth and some stuff around BF as well. However not everyone BF and hormones after birth are a very short time.

Speaking as someone who is not naturally maternal at all really, with a husband who has all the attributes of a classical maternally doting and competent parent, I think that much of it is down to it being labelled "women's work" than for any good reason. Maybe however we really are totally freaky as a couple and most people fit the stereotypes. The true story is likely to be a mix, I would have thought, as with most things in life.

If you look at rates of post-natal depression and peri-natal depression, read the boards on here with desperate women hating their situations, and remember women popping valium in the 70s and using all sorts of drugs before that when they were legal, you have to wonder whether the whole idea of "natural motherhood" and how it is so wonderfully fulfilling etc has some pretty fundamental flaws.

Yes I think so too. I think people have a knee jerk reaction to the idea of motherhood being "natural"- but people who use surrogates, or don't breastfeed or who adopt babies form just as strong bonds with their children. So why is natural motherhood put on such a pedestal?

I experienced the whole hormone/maternal instinct thing. It consisted of 1. Wanting to be with Ds and 2. Not liking to hear him cry.
I reckon those two things are probably enough to see you through the first few days until you work out what your doing!
The wanting to be with him was very noticeable because he was in SCBU and I remember thinking how odd it was to be missing someone I hadn't even met yet! It just felt physically wrong not to be with him.

Did your partner feel the same way, dash?

As I've said, I don't have children, so I'm just guessing here. But if for example my female partner gave birth to a child who then went into the SCBU, I would probably desperately want to be with him too- how much of it is about knowing that there's this tiny helpless thing you're now responsible for who isn't with you, and how much is "biology" as is often claimed?

I just asked him sosososcared. He says no, he was happy that Ds was getting the right care and he was worried about him but it didn't translate to needing to be physically with him.
That is how I remember him being as well.
Plus the way I felt was nothing like the normal love/concern I would feel for a sick relative. It was more a physical sense of "wrongness" when we were not in the same room.
I used to get really agitated waiting for DH to drive me over to the hospital to visit because I would be feeling this escalating "wrongness" and DH wasn't getting it at all.

I think this is a really interesting question and for me, some of the answer at least depends upon whether you approach it from the parents viewpoints or the baby's.

We know that a baby can recognise it's morher's voice while in the womb - but not anyone else's due to the mum's voice sounds travelling through bone and tissue so they are clearer than outside sounds.

We know that the baby can recognise it's mother within the first few hours of being born - and will prefer to look at its mother over other adults.

We know that the baby can identify its mother by smell almost immediately after birth.

We know that recognition of father comes quickly too - within a day or two.

Much of the attachment theories propose that babies tend to be evolved to create a primary attachment and a secondary attachment plus bonds with other special people but with clear preferences for their primary and secondary caregivers.

Babies are designed to be breastfed (obvs it doesn't always work etc) and mother's are designed to breastfeed, not fathers.

All this suggests to me that from an evolutionary point of view, babies are designed to be cared for initially during the infant stage primarily by their mothers, with the father recognised by the baby as secondary caregiver.

From about 9 months I think this initial attachment stage changes significantly to allow closer attachments with multiple others and possibly a closer bond with the secondary caregiver.

All of this however is from the baby's pov. From a skill pov, I don't think there is anything to suggest that women are inherently more skilled at child / baby care then men - other than of course the rather powerful societal norms which often limit contact between men and children and allow / encourage them to remain unskilled.

There was a recent study showing that mothers' brains do look different from fathers' ... but only when the mother is the main care-giver! When fathers are main care givers the 'difference' disappears.

I'll dig it out if you like, but it's been linked to on here before.

Being nurturing and wanting to be with your own baby are two different things, surely?

There are very nurturing people who don't want kids. There are people who adore their own babies but who aren't particularly nurturing themselves.

It is the case globally that women are far more likely to prioritise children's needs than men are.

You don't have to be a primary carer to prioritise children. A WOHM can priortise her children just as a SAHM does.

So the question to me would be this. Men as a group (or fathers as a group) do not globally prioritise children in their household. Either we are saying that their behaviour would change if they spent more time with their children (in which case why do WOHMs still prioritise kids), or we are saying that a group of people (fathers) who don't prioritise kids should do more childcare so that women can work more as we know mother's money will be spent with kids as the priority.

I'm not convinced this is a problem of biology, but of socialisation of men.

I think theres an awful lot of hype over the instant bond when for a lot of women it does not immediately come when the baby is born. And no I don't think women are more nurturing but it suits the patriarchy to push this agenda.

This is very interesting and something I've often thought about myself.

I certainly felt a very strong need to be close to my babies (I've had four), even when post cs my twins were taken to allow me a few hours sleep, it just felt wrong and I couldnt sleep. Was it hormones or the effect of years of social conditioning that led me to believe thats what I should feel?
At the same time I know mothers who did not feel that way at all and were perfectly fine leaving their babies with others.

I'll dig it out if you like, but it's been linked to on here before. yes please, LRD.

With my first, the bond took a little while, maybe 3 or 4 hours, because his birth was so awful that all I wanted to do was sleep. My second however, was the all consuming rush of love, but again, that might have had something to do with birth experience. While I BF, I couldn't bear not to be near them, it was a physical ache. Not sure what this adds, but maybe more anecdata?

Ok, not exactly the article I saw before, but reporting on the same research: edition.cnn.com/2014/07/01/health/fathers-brain-changes/

I think the biological differences do make a difference, but a lot of the problem is also workplace expectations.

I had horrendous morning sickness which meant I had a lot of time off work. My sickness record is absolutely impeccable apart from a few months during each pregnancy, when I was off a great deal. While my then boss was writing me off as unreliable (despite the fact I'd never been before, or as it turned out since) DP was promoted.

I BF DS for a long time, I'm sure it would have been possible to combine this with work but I would have found it really hard and I had a decent maternity package, so took the full year off. During this time DP was promoted again.

Before I got pregnant I earned slightly more than DP and we'd considered dropping a day or 2 each, by the time I returned to work he earned considerably more than me and it wasn't feasible for him to be anything but FT, while I was PT. Another pregnancy and maternity leave cemented these roles and primary childcarer is my role, because of the biological differences, which only lasted a few months, and the changes to our work lives that happened during those months.

I'm not unhappy with the way things have turned out, I like being able to attend sports day, etc, but I feel like the choices were all made by external forces, not something I really planned or thought would be a great idea, when I was planning having children.

I think DH and I both had a similar response to DS birth, but my take isn't so much that my response was because of societal norms, but that DH's response was decreased because of societal norms - does that make sense? He went back to work after 2 weeks and I could honestly see his confidence and deftness (for want of a better word) with DS reduce, as mine rose.

Seen only in relation to the baby and the parenting relationship, ML is very much in the woman's favour. I am absolutely in favour of it bring split/shared as much as possible. From my experience, DH lost out. I wish society saw it that way too.

But shergar, we're not "designed" for anything from an evolutionary point of view.

I mean, if you were to look at it that way, a baby being primarily attached to it's birth mother to the exclusion of anyone else would be a massive evolutionary design flaw, what with all the women who would die in childbirth without medical intervention.

Sososo interesting point. I tend to see the evolution of attatchment as a bit like our evolution of large heads and small hips - when things go well it gives a real advantage to that child / adult in terms of survival and success but with the flip side of a traumatic experience at loss of primary caregiver / harder more dangerous births due to head circumference.

In most early societies and cultures, we would expect that a baby who loses its mother in childbirth would be fairly immediately put into the care of another nursing mother, due to the lack of other good breastmilk. So a replacement primary carer would be typically provided straight away.

But yes, I do believe that the loss of a primary carer would be an enormously significant and traumatic experience for a child, even a very young baby and I think that both attachment theory and the real life experience of foster carers and adoptive parents tend to bear this out too.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm certainly not saying that I think women should always be the primary carer or that society's inequality of expectations of mothers and fathers is acceptable.

For me it's not the biology thing which I think is so important, it the lack of valuing childcare, home care, housework. As childcare/housework has no monetary value or stance it gets left to the women because they are insignificant. If, however, we were to really value childcare/housework for the contribution it makes to society I think you would see a shift to have men wanting to do it more. I'm also not sure I want men to do more of the caring. Not because I want womens place to be in the home rather I want "women's work" to be better respected and rewarded within society. That actually child rearing should be seen as important and worthwhile and people who do it should be respected and held in a place of esteem and value within society.