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.

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 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

Unlike other cultures, which treat becoming a mother as a major, traumatic life crisis, with special social rites and rituals, Western societies had been failing to recognize matrescence as a major transition: a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures, a transition that can make women ill, a transition in

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]

“Insipid/idealistic portrayals of motherhood made me less interested in it as a young person. I thought it was boring when it’s one of the most extreme socio-political experiences I have ever been through.”

Hoekzema’s study—of women before conception, through pregnancy and in the postpartum period—found that significant changes in the brain happened in the Default Mode Network (DMN), an area associated with processes like the perception of the self, self-referential processing, self-related mental explorations and autobiographical memory. The observed

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

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.