the science of the maternal brain published to date tells us that mothers in this vulnerable period need care, and particularly protective social policies. The one strategy which seems to inoculate most new mothers against mental illness is social support. Social support, according to scientific tools and scales, includes emotional and practical su

It’s promoting breastfeeding because it’s “free” when it can be a full-time job. It’s mothers being offered lower salaries than men or women without children. It’s mothers being less likely to be hired than men or women without children. It’s fathers taking on extra jobs in the evenings, to make up for the loss of a second income. It’s the privatiz

The toddler wanted to be carried, like the baby, into the store, but I persuaded her to walk with the promise of choosing flower bulbs to buy. It worked for a few seconds but, once inside, she lay on the cold cement floor howling. I picked her up on one side of my body and slotted her between my hip and rib cage. I could just about carry both. I wa

The presence of fetal cells in healed Cesarean section wounds suggests they could migrate to the site of damage to help in repair. But they’re also found at sites of disease, which could suggest they may have detrimental roles.

Perhaps the cultural obsession with “natural” birth reflects the extent of our detachment from our bodies and from the Earth. We are so disconnected from the rest of the natural world that we don’t know what “nature” is: bodies failing, cuckoos pushing eggs out of nests, a weirdly small human pelvis and a big infant head, illness and disease, shit

The changes the pregnant brain undergoes have been underestimated, Hoekzema told me, “as hormones and their impact often are, and thought of as something akin to an extreme menstrual period, while this is of course on a completely different scale.” It is likely the most drastic endocrine event in human life. But people think of new motherhood as ma

New research into the neurobiology of parenting and caregiving helps explain why alloparenting succeeds in different cultures. We are learning that a person doesn’t need to be pregnant for the brain to reconfigure into an infant-caregiving brain: hands-on parenting can rewire a male brain in a similar way to the effect of pregnancy and childbirth.

Babies and young children look at us with full eye contact, and none of the self-consciousness and shame that comes with adulthood. They “are the R&D department of the human species, the blue-sky guys, while we adults are production and marketing,” as Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, says.[9] No

And who soaks up the cost of this vulnerability in humans? Mothers. As the Canadian neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland explains, “the biological solution seems to have been to modify the emotions associated with self-survival (fear when threatened, discomfort when hungry) so they are also aroused for baby-threat and baby-discomfort.”[28]