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Among the news stories around the book, "The Mommy Brain"
www.themommybrain.com
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001079.cfm
Get Smart
by Laurel Robinson
Before my husband and I had our daughter, my biggest fear was that if I became a stay-at-home mom, my brain would turn to mush. I believed it would be best for me to stay home and take care of her – after all, no love is like a mother’s. But frankly, I had never been the type who pined to marry and have children, and for much of my life I didn’t even like children all that much.
As my belly swelled and the due date loomed, I envisioned getting bored at home and resenting my husband for his opportunity to leave the house each day and go to a job. I had a college degree and a start on a career. What would happen to my brainpower? I determined that I had to do something, at least find part-time work to get me into the realm of adulthood at least a little bit each week. (See “Selling Yourself Short” to see how well that plan worked out.) It seems my fears were unfounded.
Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist and mother of two, says in her book, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes us Smarter, there is scientific evidence that moms’ brains actually change for the better as a result of the joys and challenges that children bring. Moms’ brains are stimulated in ways we might not have considered; hormonal changes cause potentially permanent shifts and there is actual growth at the neural level – the same kind that occurs when you learn anything new. Fathers benefit, too: those who are hands-on in their role during pregnancy and beyond experience significant hormonal changes their childless counterparts do not.
As a result, they may become more sympathetic, more responsive, more faithful and likely to be present to protect their families. If anyone had mentioned “mommy brain” to me during my pregnancy or the first several months of my child’s life, I might have nodded knowingly and told you of the things I had done in my sleep-deprived, hormone-flooded state – forgetting what I was saying in the middle of my sentence, or attempting to “burp” a bed pillow in the middle of the night.
As my midwife quipped, “didn’t you know that when the placenta comes out, your brain goes with it?” Or as my boss’ wife said, “they call it short-term memory loss, but there’s nothing ‘short-term’ about it – it’s permanent.” It’s true, women do experience vast hormonal changes during pregnancy and after, and most of us find our memory and emotion affected in dramatic and/or humorous ways. But take heart: this does not equal the “dumbing down” of the childbearing population.
Ellison pinpoints five qualities that are enhanced in a “baby-boosted brain:” perception, efficiency, resiliency, motivation and emotional intelligence. Each is supported by numerous studies, especially in animals whose brains are most like humans. They are confirmed in human subjects through MRI scans of mothers’ brains, surveys and interviews.
Efficiency, for example, is the ultimate in multitasking: “More than a juggling of tasks,” writes Ellison, “it’s a way of life entailing an ability to focus on the essential, to ignore the irrelevant and to accomplish a lot more in a given time.” Rats that mothered a litter of pups found their way through mazes to food significantly faster than those that hadn’t had any babies; mothers of two litters were even quicker to learn the way. For survival’s sake, moms are gifted with the ability to waste no time in learning what’s important.
This brain-sharpening theory is proven daily in my life. Now that my daughter is two years old, I feel strong, “with it,” organized and … free. Just as there were challenges at my office job, for which I set goals, had accountability and evaluated results, there are many positive, mind-stimulating challenges in my role as Mommy. Talk about cutting-edge: I have to stay one step ahead of my child, and she changes every day.
From the first time she rolled over, through the bumpy road of learning to walk, I had to foresee what dangers she might careen into – and remove them, pad them or steer her clear of them. Now that she is adeptly running and climbing, this task remains, but I also find that I am necessarily a translator, educator and counselor. I have to figure out what she is telling me in semi-English toddler tongue, and I also have to translate my own instructions and mandates into words that are familiar enough for her to remember and obey.
Then there is the matter of discipline: it takes the equivalent of entire college courses in philosophy, theology and psychology to discern what battles to fight and which behaviors to allow; which methods to use to discourage dangerous, uncivilized or plain ugly activities and how to craft my own behavior constantly in such a way that it is a good example to her.
-----
From an interview of K Ellison, by Jill Kramer
http://www.pacificsun.com/smartmom.html
[KRAMER] Tell me about oxytocin and how it affects mothers.
[ELLISON] I found this to be one of the most intriguing parts of this project. Research on oxytocin has just taken off in the last six or seven years, so people are coming up with new findings about it all the time. It’s a hormone that’s important in labor and breast-feeding, but it’s not just a maternal hormone. It’s a neurotransmitter that apparently affects behavior in both males and females and it’s been linked to the ability to learn in lab animals. Scientists are finding evidence that whenever you establish a relationship of trust, your oxytocin goes up. When you see someone you’ve had good relations with, you get oxytocin. There are studies that show that when women are breast-feeding, they get a huge dose of oxytocin, at the same time their blood pressure goes down, and they become more serene. One of the world’s leading authorities on oxytocin, a Swedish expert named Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg, is convinced—although this hasn’t yet been proven—that, once you get that strong dose of oxytocin, through labor and breast-feeding, you might actually be more susceptible to it because the receptors for oxytocin are changed in the mother’s brain.
Give me some examples of how brain changes from motherhood affect your behavior with the rest of the world.
There’s research that shows that mother rats become more efficient, with increased learning and memory skills. And while human mothers haven’t been studied in labs, many say they experience the same thing.
I interviewed the fire chief in San Francisco, Joanne Hayes-White—the first woman and first mother to be fire chief of any big city department—and she told me that she found that the skills she was using at home—triage, time management, negotiating with her three children—were easily carried over. Working under pressure, handling interruptions, flexibility—all those skills are refined, through much practice, in motherhood.
I don’t think anybody would argue with the idea that parenthood can enhance skills like time management and flexibility. But does that really mean you’re smarter? These may be wonderful qualities, but they’re not going to help you on an IQ test.
So what is smart? Is your definition of “smart” doing well on an IQ test?
When you look at it closely, we don’t seem to have a very clear definition of smart. For instance, there has been a lot of relatively recent focus on “emotional intelligence,” what we used to call “people skills,” and how that can be such a strong factor in good marriages and working relationships, the things that ultimately make you happy.
I ended up dividing the core of my book into five chapters, looking at various kinds of intelligence—perceptivity, efficiency, resilience, motivation and emotional intelligence—and showing what the most cutting-edge research says about how they may be changed. And I opened the book with Webster’s definition of “smart”: basically mentally alert, bright. Focused, in other words. As one psychiatrist told me, a mission can do that. Children are a mission and a mission focuses the mind.
Isn’t there a flip side, though? Your ability to focus on something is enhanced, but the thing a parent chooses to focus on is their kid—which, in the workplace, for example, is often a problem.
There is an image that mothers are less dependable because they’re so focused on their kid. But I talked to the person who does the hiring at a big hotel company in Novato and asked what her experience was with working moms. And she said, “I would hire them first any time because they’re more dependable. They need that paycheck and they need the benefits. The others can come and go.” In our society now, a mother is usually both a nurturer and a financial provider.
So to be focused on your child also means being focused on your work. When this doesn’t happen, it’s usually because you’re not sure your child is safe. If you have bad daycare, and a lot of mothers do, you’ll be anxious and perhaps not as focused. I use an example in the book of a company in Silicon Valley that has on-site daycare, and they say their working mothers are tremendous assets, motivated and productive. Also, the high-achieving mothers I’ve talked to who felt most blessed by having a “mommy brain” had extraordinary support at home.
Hayes-White, for example, has a stay-at-home husband and parents living close by. So she does a lot of mothering, but when she’s at her job, she can focus more sharply on that. In my own case, even though I’m more of the part-time, stay-at-home parent, I’ve got terrific support from my husband, Jack Epstein, who’s a foreign editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a very devoted, wise dad. If we had more affordable and high-quality childcare and more flexible jobs, like most other industrialized nations, more women would be able to work at their best as well as mother at their best.
When you became a mother, you were already a very motivated career woman, often traveling to dangerous places. How did having kids affect your work life?
They affected it dramatically. For one thing, I took my babies with me on assignment for a year or so each, while they were breast-feeding. I lived in Rio but had responsibility for half a dozen other countries in southern South America, so my babies got schlepped along to reporting in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, even the Amazon forest. Naturally, in doing so, I was inclined to cut back on the more risky travel. I confess I fought against going to cover a hostage crisis in Peru when there were bombs going off in the streets—and Peru technically wasn’t part of my beat. In that case, I ended up weaning Joey and going alone, because the reporter who’d been covering the story needed a break.
To an extent, I think I was working even harder than I had been, to prove there was no question that having a child would make me less capable or motivated. At the same time, I was profoundly grateful to my bosses then, at the Miami Herald, who were so supportive they actually paid for our nanny to travel with me while the babies were breast-feeding. I was their first foreign correspondent who was also a mother, so we were all innovating.
www.themommybrain.com
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001079.cfm
Get Smart
by Laurel Robinson
Before my husband and I had our daughter, my biggest fear was that if I became a stay-at-home mom, my brain would turn to mush. I believed it would be best for me to stay home and take care of her – after all, no love is like a mother’s. But frankly, I had never been the type who pined to marry and have children, and for much of my life I didn’t even like children all that much.
As my belly swelled and the due date loomed, I envisioned getting bored at home and resenting my husband for his opportunity to leave the house each day and go to a job. I had a college degree and a start on a career. What would happen to my brainpower? I determined that I had to do something, at least find part-time work to get me into the realm of adulthood at least a little bit each week. (See “Selling Yourself Short” to see how well that plan worked out.) It seems my fears were unfounded.
Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist and mother of two, says in her book, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes us Smarter, there is scientific evidence that moms’ brains actually change for the better as a result of the joys and challenges that children bring. Moms’ brains are stimulated in ways we might not have considered; hormonal changes cause potentially permanent shifts and there is actual growth at the neural level – the same kind that occurs when you learn anything new. Fathers benefit, too: those who are hands-on in their role during pregnancy and beyond experience significant hormonal changes their childless counterparts do not.
As a result, they may become more sympathetic, more responsive, more faithful and likely to be present to protect their families. If anyone had mentioned “mommy brain” to me during my pregnancy or the first several months of my child’s life, I might have nodded knowingly and told you of the things I had done in my sleep-deprived, hormone-flooded state – forgetting what I was saying in the middle of my sentence, or attempting to “burp” a bed pillow in the middle of the night.
As my midwife quipped, “didn’t you know that when the placenta comes out, your brain goes with it?” Or as my boss’ wife said, “they call it short-term memory loss, but there’s nothing ‘short-term’ about it – it’s permanent.” It’s true, women do experience vast hormonal changes during pregnancy and after, and most of us find our memory and emotion affected in dramatic and/or humorous ways. But take heart: this does not equal the “dumbing down” of the childbearing population.
Ellison pinpoints five qualities that are enhanced in a “baby-boosted brain:” perception, efficiency, resiliency, motivation and emotional intelligence. Each is supported by numerous studies, especially in animals whose brains are most like humans. They are confirmed in human subjects through MRI scans of mothers’ brains, surveys and interviews.
Efficiency, for example, is the ultimate in multitasking: “More than a juggling of tasks,” writes Ellison, “it’s a way of life entailing an ability to focus on the essential, to ignore the irrelevant and to accomplish a lot more in a given time.” Rats that mothered a litter of pups found their way through mazes to food significantly faster than those that hadn’t had any babies; mothers of two litters were even quicker to learn the way. For survival’s sake, moms are gifted with the ability to waste no time in learning what’s important.
This brain-sharpening theory is proven daily in my life. Now that my daughter is two years old, I feel strong, “with it,” organized and … free. Just as there were challenges at my office job, for which I set goals, had accountability and evaluated results, there are many positive, mind-stimulating challenges in my role as Mommy. Talk about cutting-edge: I have to stay one step ahead of my child, and she changes every day.
From the first time she rolled over, through the bumpy road of learning to walk, I had to foresee what dangers she might careen into – and remove them, pad them or steer her clear of them. Now that she is adeptly running and climbing, this task remains, but I also find that I am necessarily a translator, educator and counselor. I have to figure out what she is telling me in semi-English toddler tongue, and I also have to translate my own instructions and mandates into words that are familiar enough for her to remember and obey.
Then there is the matter of discipline: it takes the equivalent of entire college courses in philosophy, theology and psychology to discern what battles to fight and which behaviors to allow; which methods to use to discourage dangerous, uncivilized or plain ugly activities and how to craft my own behavior constantly in such a way that it is a good example to her.
-----
From an interview of K Ellison, by Jill Kramer
http://www.pacificsun.com/smartmom.html
[KRAMER] Tell me about oxytocin and how it affects mothers.
[ELLISON] I found this to be one of the most intriguing parts of this project. Research on oxytocin has just taken off in the last six or seven years, so people are coming up with new findings about it all the time. It’s a hormone that’s important in labor and breast-feeding, but it’s not just a maternal hormone. It’s a neurotransmitter that apparently affects behavior in both males and females and it’s been linked to the ability to learn in lab animals. Scientists are finding evidence that whenever you establish a relationship of trust, your oxytocin goes up. When you see someone you’ve had good relations with, you get oxytocin. There are studies that show that when women are breast-feeding, they get a huge dose of oxytocin, at the same time their blood pressure goes down, and they become more serene. One of the world’s leading authorities on oxytocin, a Swedish expert named Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg, is convinced—although this hasn’t yet been proven—that, once you get that strong dose of oxytocin, through labor and breast-feeding, you might actually be more susceptible to it because the receptors for oxytocin are changed in the mother’s brain.
Give me some examples of how brain changes from motherhood affect your behavior with the rest of the world.
There’s research that shows that mother rats become more efficient, with increased learning and memory skills. And while human mothers haven’t been studied in labs, many say they experience the same thing.
I interviewed the fire chief in San Francisco, Joanne Hayes-White—the first woman and first mother to be fire chief of any big city department—and she told me that she found that the skills she was using at home—triage, time management, negotiating with her three children—were easily carried over. Working under pressure, handling interruptions, flexibility—all those skills are refined, through much practice, in motherhood.
I don’t think anybody would argue with the idea that parenthood can enhance skills like time management and flexibility. But does that really mean you’re smarter? These may be wonderful qualities, but they’re not going to help you on an IQ test.
So what is smart? Is your definition of “smart” doing well on an IQ test?
When you look at it closely, we don’t seem to have a very clear definition of smart. For instance, there has been a lot of relatively recent focus on “emotional intelligence,” what we used to call “people skills,” and how that can be such a strong factor in good marriages and working relationships, the things that ultimately make you happy.
I ended up dividing the core of my book into five chapters, looking at various kinds of intelligence—perceptivity, efficiency, resilience, motivation and emotional intelligence—and showing what the most cutting-edge research says about how they may be changed. And I opened the book with Webster’s definition of “smart”: basically mentally alert, bright. Focused, in other words. As one psychiatrist told me, a mission can do that. Children are a mission and a mission focuses the mind.
Isn’t there a flip side, though? Your ability to focus on something is enhanced, but the thing a parent chooses to focus on is their kid—which, in the workplace, for example, is often a problem.
There is an image that mothers are less dependable because they’re so focused on their kid. But I talked to the person who does the hiring at a big hotel company in Novato and asked what her experience was with working moms. And she said, “I would hire them first any time because they’re more dependable. They need that paycheck and they need the benefits. The others can come and go.” In our society now, a mother is usually both a nurturer and a financial provider.
So to be focused on your child also means being focused on your work. When this doesn’t happen, it’s usually because you’re not sure your child is safe. If you have bad daycare, and a lot of mothers do, you’ll be anxious and perhaps not as focused. I use an example in the book of a company in Silicon Valley that has on-site daycare, and they say their working mothers are tremendous assets, motivated and productive. Also, the high-achieving mothers I’ve talked to who felt most blessed by having a “mommy brain” had extraordinary support at home.
Hayes-White, for example, has a stay-at-home husband and parents living close by. So she does a lot of mothering, but when she’s at her job, she can focus more sharply on that. In my own case, even though I’m more of the part-time, stay-at-home parent, I’ve got terrific support from my husband, Jack Epstein, who’s a foreign editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a very devoted, wise dad. If we had more affordable and high-quality childcare and more flexible jobs, like most other industrialized nations, more women would be able to work at their best as well as mother at their best.
When you became a mother, you were already a very motivated career woman, often traveling to dangerous places. How did having kids affect your work life?
They affected it dramatically. For one thing, I took my babies with me on assignment for a year or so each, while they were breast-feeding. I lived in Rio but had responsibility for half a dozen other countries in southern South America, so my babies got schlepped along to reporting in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, even the Amazon forest. Naturally, in doing so, I was inclined to cut back on the more risky travel. I confess I fought against going to cover a hostage crisis in Peru when there were bombs going off in the streets—and Peru technically wasn’t part of my beat. In that case, I ended up weaning Joey and going alone, because the reporter who’d been covering the story needed a break.
To an extent, I think I was working even harder than I had been, to prove there was no question that having a child would make me less capable or motivated. At the same time, I was profoundly grateful to my bosses then, at the Miami Herald, who were so supportive they actually paid for our nanny to travel with me while the babies were breast-feeding. I was their first foreign correspondent who was also a mother, so we were all innovating.
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