Parental Brain 101 Series by Dr Jodi Pawluski

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t have survived the first few years of motherhood without my partner-in-parenting—my fabulous husband—and the friends, family, babysitters, neighbours, and even strangers who helped along the way.

We’re not supposed to mother alone.

And yet many of us still feel that mothers are expected to instinctively know how to do everything - that caring for a newborn should come “naturally”.

When we look at nature and neuroscience, that belief starts to change, or at least I hope it does.

Mothering can take many different forms, but at its foundation, it is about being ready to learn. This is all brain. And, if it is mostly about learning then that means everyone can do it, everyone can learn to parent and take care of a child.

The heart of it all is the parental brain and one of the big question I have is:

How does the brain adapt to support caregiving?

Much of what we know about this topic comes from decades of research in animals which is summarized in the book The Parental Brain by neuroscientist Michael Numan – a key researcher in uncovering the neural circuits that drive caregiving behaviour in mothers.

This article is a short introduction to that fascinating science. If you want the deeper dive, you can walk through the book with me at my Parental Brain 101 series on my Substack where I am summarizing each chapter of Dr Numan’s very dense and detailed textbook.

What Is the Parental Brain?

The parental brain refers to the network of neural circuits that enable mammals, including humans, to recognize, respond to, and care for their offspring. It is an intricate and complex coordination between a number of brain regions that allows a mother (or father, parent, caregiver) to process the cues from their infant, understand what the cues mean, and then decide an action to take.

Figure modified from James E. Swain, The human parental brain: In vivo neuroimaging, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, Volume 35, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 1242-1254.

In other words, parenting is a result of specific neural systems that act together to ensure offspring survival.

How Does the Brain Change with Motherhood?

Being pregnant and birthing a baby is accompagnied by the most significant period of brain plasticity in adult life. It's pretty amazing, in fact (That's why I wrote a book about it and have a podcast on it).

Research on the maternal brain shows changes in the structure and function of the brain in areas important for:

• empathy

• emotional processing

• threat detection

• reward and motivation

• understanding the needs of others

• decision making

  
  

These changes help parents become responsive to infant cues.

A baby’s cry, for example, becomes a powerful signal that captures attention and motivates action.

If you’re interested in the neuroscience behind these maternal brain changes, you can also explore my related work linked below but head over to Parental Brain 101 posts at Mom Brain Musings on Substack for more.

• Mom Brain Rebranded → https://www.jodipawluski.com/post/mom-brain-rebranded

• Mom Brain and Mental Load → https://www.jodipawluski.com/post/mum-brain-or-mental-over-load

These neural adaptations help parents prioritize infant needs and navigate the intense demands of early caregiving.

But here’s the key point:

These changes don't just happen in mothers.

Dad Brain

One of the most exciting discoveries in parenting neuroscience is that fathers’ brains change too. Just to be clear, this wasn’t one of the most exciting discoveries for me because I think we spend far too much time studying males, but, that being said, I see the incredible value in knowing that a dad can parent too and that he has all the parts in his brain to do this.

When fathers are actively involved in infant care, their brains show increased activation in many of the same networks seen in mothers.

Hormones also play a role. For example, fathers who spend more time caregiving often show changes in hormones linked to nurturing behaviour, including oxytocin and testosterone.

Importantly, these changes appear to be experience-dependent. This means that the more hands-on caregiving a father provides, the more his brain learns and adapts to parenting.

Experience parenting is the key for both mothers and fathers.

It's not all about biological moms and dads.

It should be obvious to all of us that that pregnancy and birth isn't essential to parent or to have a brain that can fall in love with a baby and take care of them.

There is neuroscience research starting to come out on this, showing that adoptive mothers have very similar changes in their brains in comparison to birthing mothers.

This reinforces an important message that the parental brain and parenting is shaped by experience, relationships, and social context, in addition to biological systems.

Of course there are many questions to be answered.

• How does the brain change to be ‘parental’ ?

• What are mechanisms and hormones at play?

• How do these brain changes develop in the first weeks, months, and years postpartum in birthing mothers, fathers, alloparents?

• What makes the brain become attracted to an infant?

• What happens to the brain with a perinatal mental illness?

  
  

So many questions and the search for answers continues.

If you want a Full Deep Dive into the Neuroscience of Parenting you might like my Substack where I explore all things mom brain, matrescence and perinatal mental health.

Subscribe to Mom Brain Musings for more on the Parental Brain.