In an interview with Michael Feigelson, CEO of the Van Leer Foundation, Dr Helena Rutherford, who leads The Before and After Baby Lab (The BABL) at the Yale Child Study Center, explores blind spots and misconceptions in the neuropsychological community’s understanding of early parenthood, and what research is beginning to reveal about the transition into motherhood and fatherhood.
While parenthood is as old as humankind itself, the study of how it changes us as human beings—biologically, socially, psychologically, and more—is relatively nascent. Why is that?
We’ve known a lot about the infant brain since around the 1980s, but we’ve only studied the parental brain for maybe the last 10 years. I think it’s because that’s just how society has treated parents—we haven’t really paid attention to them.
You’re seen as an adult becoming a parent, and you’re expected to get on with it. The thinking has been, This is a normative experience that everybody goes through, so why would we even begin to ask any questions about it? There’s been a dismissal. The purpose of my lab is to address and study the longitudinal nature of parenthood. Becoming and being a parent is a developmental process—a time of experience-based brain plasticity—and it starts during pregnancy. To me, it’s fascinating to observe parents’ attentional processing—what’s most relevant to them, what they attend to, what they’re engaged with. There’s just a natural curiosity there that drives me to really understand the nature of parent behaviour and social interactions.
Why is your research group called The Before and After Baby Lab?
It took us a long time to come up with the name and the logo, and, actually, it was a group process. The name encompasses that you’re a parent before you have a baby. Much of the parental processing that happens postnatally has antecedents in pregnancy. You don’t become a parent overnight with the birth of your child, or however a child comes to you. In reality, there are a series of psychological and biological changes happening that prepare an individual for the transition to parenthood.
Unfortunately, up until now, there is generally a disregard for what is going on in pregnancy for the mother. When we think about the prenatal parent, we focus exclusively on how the baby’s developing. We’re finding out what size of fruit the baby’s going to be week-by-week, but we’re not asking the same questions of the mother’s own development. What gets me out of bed in the morning is: What’s that process?
There are many parenting interventions that are incredibly successful, but the majority are given to people after they’ve had their children. At The BABL, our research is designed to find out who might be at risk or most vulnerable before the baby arrives. Our goal is to show the importance of introducing services ahead of time so they can have the maximum impact on not only the mom, but also on the child and the broader family system. We’re learning so much about how the brain is changing during pregnancy. We know that neurobiology and psychology go hand-in-hand. Let’s think about that as part of a woman’s routine prenatal healthcare. This is a time for actually sitting down and having conversations with women about how they’re anticipating their transition to parenthood.
This idea that becoming a parent is gradual rather than instantaneous feels surprising yet obvious. Are there other prevalent misconceptions about the developmental process of parenthood?
I’m not a fan of the concept of “maternal instinct.” It gets used in both positive and negative ways, but usually when it’s brought up to me, it’s referring to this inherent motivational drive that leads somebody to become a parent and drives all of their behaviour as though they have no control over it. And it’s often thought that every mother should have a maternal instinct, and you’re not a good parent if you lack it.
What does science have to say about maternal instinct?
Science is telling us that there’s a lot of variability. A key point of the research we do in The BABL is looking for individual differences; every single person is transitioning to parenthood with different needs and different expectations. You can talk to multiple parents and they’re all going to tell you that they felt like a parent at different times. Some of them didn’t feel like a parent during pregnancy but the feeling came online postnatally. There is no hard and fast rule.
We know that there are regions of the brain that are important to motivation, particularly those involved in how we process what is positive or rewarding. When mothers are looking at photographs of their baby, particularly—and not surprisingly—if their baby is smiling, their brain lights up like a Christmas tree. We can use that information as a marker to think about: What are the situations where we might see dampened reward-processing or dampened motivation in a mother? But that’s still not getting at this romantic idea of maternal instinct.
Reframing maternal instinct is very important because the current framing sets people up to fail—and that’s what really bothers me about it. It implies there’s a right way of parenting and that the right way will just switch on. In truth, there’s no minimum level of instinct that means that you’re going to be a good parent.
Is this issue about “instinct” also a problem for dads?
The same applies to fathers. If you make a decision to become a parent, regardless of your sex or your gender identity, you may have strong feelings about it, or you may not. You may need more time with the baby to “feel” like a dad.
We’ve got to move away from trying to segregate mothers from fathers in our representations of parents, because we’re doing a disservice to families and to child development. A lot of dads are not very involved in terms of the prenatal experiences because of the way our health systems are set up. When a person is pregnant, they become the focus of attention. People overlook the roles of partners and other caregivers, but they’re going through their own process as well. And as far as maternal or parental instinct goes, I think we have come up with a new term.
What phrase could we replace it with?
“Maternal psychology” or “Paternal psychology.” We should be asking: What’s the underlying psychology of motherhood or fatherhood? That gives you more opportunity to think flexibly about individual differences and how motivation can exist on a continuum.
What would you say is the most influential factor in terms of how quickly or how completely people learn to be parents?
There’s really nothing as powerful as interaction— nothing like that experience of spending time with your child postpartum that’s going to reinforce those changes that are happening over time. But so much of the prenatal period is priming the maternal brain, and I would say, the non-maternal brain too, in terms of readiness. There are lots of signals and cues in the environment letting you know that the baby is coming, even if you’re not gestationally carrying the baby.
Could you tell me about one of those prenatal signals or cues?
One area we have been focused on is fetal movement. Fetal movement is a communicative signal from the baby telling you not only that it’s alive and it’s moving, but also that it’s coming. In The BABL, we looked at fetal movement in terms of the broader maternal psychology and neuroscience. We conducted electroencephalogram (EEG) assessments on pregnant women to gauge their neural responses when looking at infants’ distress faces and infants’ neutral faces. We found that the women who had had a more active fetus in utero had a larger neural response to the infant distress face than those with less fetal movement. We have interpreted that to mean that mothers who have more active fetuses are paying more attention to infant distress as they’ve been primed more by the baby’s movement, which suggests that there could be a link between maternal psychology and the maternal brain within the context of fetal movement.
Babies kick and twist in the womb to communicate, but once they’re born, they cry, among other cues. You’ve done a fair amount of research on parental response to infant crying. Can you tell me more about it?
I think a baby crying is inherently powerful. One amazing thing about baby cries is that they propagate across space. You don’t have to be in the same room as your baby crying; you could hear them faintly. Either way, there’s a distinct signal from the baby that says “I need you” and it really pulls you towards caring for the baby. But the signal is not just about hearing the cry. It’s also about trying to interpret the cry—in other words, what does that cry mean? Is my baby hungry or getting tired and do they need to sleep? Before we go in and pick up the baby, or try to nurse the baby, we go through a series of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive processes. You watch an interaction between a mom and a baby, and you see how quickly a mom is responding to her baby, but the reality is that so much has gone on in just microseconds of time.
How does studying a mother’s reaction to her baby’s cries have the potential to help parents?
It gives us an opportunity to say, let’s look at mechanisms that are important to perception, to attention, and to cognitive interpretations, and then to think about their intersection with mental health. If the mechanisms are working differently in a mother with a mental health condition than in a mom without one, we can use that knowledge to inform interventions. That said, it’s important to note that there are many other factors to consider. That’s what makes it complicated to study parenting, because you can’t control every single variable. Everybody comes to parenthood with different expectations and anxieties and levels of excitement. We all have our prior experiences with our own parents that we bring into our parenting relationship. We inherently lose a lot by thinking about parents as a group and not thinking about the unique trajectory of each parent.
Your own daughter is five now. Do you share any of your research with her?
I talk a lot with her about the brain. It was one of the first organs of the body she learned about. She has a brain cookie cutter and we make brain cookies and play dough cookies of the brain.
Does she have a favourite part of the brain?
I don’t think she has one yet. I’m just happy that she knows it’s there and it’s important.
