After the birth of our daughter, our nocturnal lives became very different. Almost before she woke and started mewling or crying, I would feel it in my body: a bespoke ultrasound, zapped by my electric eel. I’d start, jump up, and turn to her like a zombie. My husband, back then, wouldn’t hear a thing, and slumber on.
One of the many aspects of having a child that surprised me was how completely altered I felt after pregnancy and childbirth. It was as if my daughter had never really left my body. I felt like a new person, whereas – at first – my husband seemed the same. We were connected by our new, shared task. But as we had got there by such different routes, there was also a sense of disconnection.
Learning about the concept of matrescence was transformative. The word simply means the process of becoming a mother. It was coined in the 1970s by Dana Raphael, an American anthropologist, who explained that in most societies across the world there is an understanding – usually with special rites and rituals – that when a baby is born, so is a mother, and that she requires social support and care, too, something our society has forgotten.
Patrescence, the process of becoming a father, is also a distinct biological reality. While neuroscientific research into the parental brain has focused mostly on women who have been pregnant – finding that the brain is at its most plastic during the transition to motherhood, comparable in its significance to adolescence – scientists are now exploring “dad brain”.
In 2020, a ground-breaking study by a group of scientists in Madrid looked at the brains of men before their partners became pregnant and after the baby was born. They discovered that having a baby actually changes a father’s brain anatomy. First-time fathers showed a significant reduction in cortical volume and thickness – an area of the brain associated with empathy, attention and visual processing. The higher the volume reduction, the stronger the father’s brain responds to pictures of his baby. Reduction might sound like a negative effect, but researchers theorise that it means the brain actually becomes more streamlined or fine-tuned to do what it needs to do: care for an infant.
This built on previous studies, which found that the amount of time a father spends with an infant, and even how affectionate he is, is associated with greater hormonal and neural changes, such as the reduction of testosterone, and increases in oxytocin and activity in the brain’s reward systems. In other words: the more a father cuddles, holds, gazes at, speaks to, sings to and plays with his infant, the more rewarding he finds it.
Neurobiology suggests people of all genders experience parenting in much the same way: it can just take longer for fathers, as well as non-biological mothers and adoptive parents. They also develop the hormones associated with nurturing – oxytocin, prolactin, and vasopressin. But without the experience of pregnancy, which gives the mother a kind of head-start hormonally, it is dependent on direct connection with the infant. Touch, smell and gaze, for example. When babies and adults make eye contact, their brainwaves actually become synchronised.
I observed all this in my husband. As he spent more time one-on-one with our daughter, I could almost see his reward pathways firing more strongly and rapidly before my eyes. His response to her cues, her cries and her needs became quicker and more skilled. He seemed increasingly stoned on oxytocin – as I did, and do – from the physical intimacy of early parenthood: from sniffing our baby’s head, or watching her giggle, or when she started to fling her arms around our necks like a little baby monkey and squeeze.
Early on, our daughter had colic – crying for hours a day and night with no obvious cause (apart from the intensity of being alive!) – but over time my husband devised the exact type of hold, swing and bounce she needed to soothe her. Through nights of practice, experimentation and learning her language, he found the solution. I would lie, exhausted, after feeding the baby, my nervous system worn out by the sound of her crying and looking after her all day while he was at work, and he would shuffle and bop and sway – quite frantically, and theatrically, because that's what worked – around the red-lit room while holding her very close to his chest and heart, sometimes for hours, until she calmed and was lulled to sleep. The more he held her, the more she wanted to be held by him, and the more he wanted to hold her. (It's safe to say it was partly his ability to be involved through the night, after months of sleep deprivation, that helped me to recover from postnatal depression.)
It makes sense that we all have the neural circuitry to look after babies and young children, when you consider we evolved in child-rearing networks in which infants were attended to by multiple people, and maternal mortality was high. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the eminent primatologist, writes in her latest book Father Time, an investigation into the nurturing potential of men, that every man contains “ancient caregiving tendencies that render a man every bit as proactive and nurturing as the most committed mother.”
But the biological changes of fatherhood mean that patrescence can also be a vulnerable time. A study this year by the University of Southern California found that the biological changes that occur for fathers also carry risks for their mental health. Men in the study who had more brain changes – higher decreases in grey matter volume – reported better bonding, parental attachment, lower parenting stress and more time spent with infants. But they also reported more symptoms of depression, anxiety, distress and worse sleep later in the postnatal period.
“These results may point to a cost of caregiving for men,” said Darby Saxbe, one of the authors of the study. “Parenting is hard! The same neural adaptations that support more hands-on parenting may carry a psychological toll.” We don’t know enough about post-natal depression in mothers, or fathers. Figures suggest that 10 per cent of fathers experience post-natal depression, but it may be more. Stigma around men talking about their mental health may make it harder for them to ask for help. It is likely that many of the same experiences that might make becoming a mother more complex – childhood trauma and adversity, birth trauma, previous episodes of mental ill health,stress and social factors, such as structural racism, poverty – impact fatherhood, too.
Men also report feelings of stress and burnout in balancing work and the new expectations of fatherhood. Care work is not meaningfully valued in our late-capitalist economic system, so paternal leave policies in traditional workplaces can be sluggish, and, in some environments, men may feel stigmatised for leaving on time to pick up the kids.
We are living in an extraordinary time for becoming a parent. The contact and connection men have with their children is much higher than in previous generations. My father never changed a nappy nor was he in the room when we were born, which wasn’t unusual in the 1980s. We know, now, that fathering time has profound positive impacts on children's health, well-being and development.
Even so, the parenting ideal in contemporary society - often called "intensive motherhood" - is very focussed on the mother as primary care-giver. It shocked me to find out when we became parents that social expectations, structures and systems are overridingly geared towards the mother taking a primary caregiver role in the early years until school (and afterwards).
It took me a while to begin to unlearn some of the social ideas about motherhood, and not back-seat drive my husband. But the new science of the parental brain clearly chips away at the stubborn social idea that only women have a so-called essential "nature" to be able to care for young children - and that everyone can share in the toils and the massive rewards of care-giving.
Our eldest child is 7 now. The more care-giving we both did, the more attuned and skilled we became. It was a turbulent beginning, though, as it is for many new parent couples, and knowing more about matrescence and patrescence – that the transition to parenthood can be a wondrous time, yes, but also one of biological, psychological upheaval and social ideals – would have made it a lot less of a shock. Now, years later, my husband wakes in the night and attends to our children as much as I do. Sometimes, I don’t even wake up.
Lucy Jones is the author of Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood
