'Maternal instinct' isn't what you think it is
Chelsea Conaboy's "Mother Brain" rewires our understanding of how parenting changes our minds
Delighted to share this interview with Chelsea Conaboy, a journalist and author of the 2022 book “Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood.” It was great to talk to Chelsea about all the things we have gotten culturally wrong about what it means to become a parent — and the exciting truths we can all embrace. I hope you will check out her book! An audio version of this interview will be in your in-box next week.
Tell me about your book:
I’m a reporter, and I’ve written a lot about health and health policy. In 2015, when I was working as a features editor at the Portland Press Herald, my first son was born, and he was born on the small size, under 6 pounds. At the same time, we were moving into a new house and renovating the kitchen. It was a stressful time; I was really overwhelmed with worry for him — whether he was getting enough food and growing as he should, and about my own ability to care for him and meet his needs. And also, worry about the worry itself. I really was fearful that it was a sign that something was wrong with me, that uncertainty of new motherhood.
I went looking for answers of why I was feeling the way I did, and started first looking at the research on maternal anxiety and began learning about the parts of the brain that change in the early postpartum period and become more active, the areas related to motivation and vigilance and meaning making, and how it’s thought that those changes might underpin our feelings of anxiety.
That was really reassuring to me as a new mom. It really changed my whole mindset to think, it’s not that something’s broken in me, it’s that I’m changing in this way that I need to put it in perspective. It’s also adaptive that it is helping me become the parent I need to be. As I read more about the brain changes in new parenthood, I started feeling like, why didn’t I know about this, and what else is there to know? What am I missing?
After my second son was born in 2017, I was a freelancer, I didn’t go back to my job. I started freelancing for newspapers and magazines and had the time to really commit to getting the story right. I ended up reporting a piece for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in 2018. That piece was really widely read. That really showed that there was an audience for it and that people were really hungry for this information.
What do you think has kept science out of the narrative about becoming a parent?
A lot of the human parental brain science is pretty new, just in the last 20 years. But the idea of maternal instinct feels science-based, and we have embraced it as a kind of biological fact. We like to think about science as objective and fact-based, but it’s always true that it is shaped by our culture and by the people who are asking the questions and seeking out the answers.
And in the case of maternal instinct, the people that were writing that into scientific theory were religious men who had really problematic views about women and race. Some of the most prominent people who were writing about maternal instinct were eugenicists who were trying to convince white women to have more babies. So not only is it not based in more rigorous science, it’s also overtly social conditioning — trying to convince women of a certain role. And there were people who were calling it out; women who were calling it out. They were like, We see what you’re trying to do here.
We like to think about science as objective and fact-based, but it’s always true that it is shaped by our culture and by the people who are asking the questions and seeking out the answers.
The naturalists at the turn of the 20th century were doing the work of observing animals and insects and things, and imposing on them the gender norms of the day, and that influenced people who were writing instinct theory, which was happening because Darwin had torn down this wall between humans and animals. It was this self-feeding loop.
What do you think is important about the idea of “instinct” that makes people not want to let go of it?
I think maternal instinct feels true. My whole book is dedicated to exploring the neurobiological changes that come with being a parent, and they’re really deep and profound and lifelong. My point is that they’re not what we’ve been told they are. But maternal instinct feels true in the sense that we are changed by this, and we know we’re changed by this, and we often see it in others too. We see this protective mama bear or the nurturing mama bird image, so it feels like that’s confirmation of this idea. It’s a classic case of disinformation — it’s this thing that seems plausible, that gets repeated over and over, until we believe it reflexively. So that’s really deep for people. They think it’s sort of always been true.
And a lot of the people that are mad about this are the same people who are struggling to understand our changing ideas of sex and gender. Maternal instinct is so fundamental to our own understanding of our own families, that if it isn’t true, then what can we trust? The flip side of that is, it is also the same feeling that has left so many of us, when we get to parenthood, feeling like, What the hell? This thing I thought was true isn’t true, we feel completely blindsided by that and really struggle with that. So it’s part of this broader cultural conversation challenging things that people have always thought to be really basic at the center of our human nature.
If we think of maternal instinct as something of value that might be lost, what is that loss? And for whom?
Leta Hollingworth was a trailblazing psychologist, and William MacDougall was one of the early psychologist that wrote about maternal instinct and a big time eugenicist, and she wrote an essay in response to him that was published in 1916 that was just calling it out and saying that women were being compelled to have more children by the same forces that were compelling soldiers to go to war. She talked about all the images of the Madonna and Child that filled museums, the glorification of maternal love, and also the hiding of the hard stuff — specifically, maternal mortality rates which were 60 times what they are today basically. She was like, These things we don’t talk about, but you’ll talk about the glory of maternal love to no end. So there’s a gentler story of what may be lost, which may be about how we see ourselves and how we think of a family, and then there is this more cynical story which that it’s a tool to manipulate women.
What would you tell your new parent self?
Two things come to mind immediately. One is about attention, and how we talk a lot about maternal love and bonding and attachment. Those things are complicated and important, but really what a baby needs most of all from us is attention. The first stages of adaptation postpartum are really focused on compelling us to look at our kids and keep going back to meet their needs again and again, even when we have no idea what we’re doing and even when we make mistakes. And that serves two purposes. One is to keep our babies alive because they’re small and vulnerable and they need us to keep them alive. The other role is to push us into this period of really intense learning where we have lots and lots of practice taking in their cues and figuring out what those needs are and trying to do better at predicting them.
We talk so much about the feeling of warmth and love and connection that might come in those first days, but those are like — that’s just one way that that attention can feel. And it’s not the only way. In some ways, I think, attention precedes those feelings. We have to commit ourselves to seeing them and knowing them, and that warmth can come later.
Our goal is to reach across the chasm, but we never actually pull it closed. And that’s actually the goal — the reaching is the whole point.
So much of the narrative around those first days is, you’ll have this flood of oxytocin and your baby will latch on and the bond will be sealed forever, but so often it doesn’t go that way or feel that way, and we feel like we have failed in that. That is actually just one pathway, and it’s just one way that it can feel.
And that attention for others might feel like worry or it may feel like many things at once. You get the warmth but you also have fear and shock and a sense of not knowing how to feel. And all of that, in all of those feelings, you can still be really compelled to pay attention to them. And I wish I had a better sense of that. That it didn’t have to feel a certain way. What I needed was to be committing my attention to my son, and that was something I was already doing.
The science helped me understand more about how the parental brain goes about understanding the inside of our children’s brains — their mental states and emotions, which are separate from us. In the book, I use this metaphor of a chasm, that our goal is to reach across the chasm, but we never actually pull it closed. And that’s actually the goal — the reaching is the whole point. That has really helped me a lot to understand my kids, who are very different from each other and sometimes feel very different from me, to really appreciate our connection in a new way.