Brain Rules for Baby (Updated and Expanded). John Medina
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have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.
Social isolation can lead to clinical depression in the parents, which can affect the parents’ physical health, including an increased risk of infectious diseases and heart attacks. Social isolation is the lonely result of the energy crisis that faces most new parents. Studies show it is the main complaint of most marriages in the transition to parenthood. One mom wrote:
I have never felt more alone than I do right now. My kids are oblivious and my husband ignores me. All I do is housework, cooking, childcare … I’m not a person anymore. I can’t get a minute to myself, and yet, I am completely isolated.
Loneliness, painful and ubiquitous, is experienced by as many as 80 percent of new parents. After the birth of a child, couples have only about one-third as much time alone together as they had when they were childless. The thrill of having a child wears off, but the incessant job of parenting does not. Being a mom or dad becomes a duty, then a chore. Night after sleepless night depletes the family energy supply; increasing spousal conflicts exhaust the reserves.
These losses cause a couple’s social activities to run out of gas. Mom and dad have trouble maintaining friendships with each other, let alone with acquaintances. Friends stop coming over. Parents find little energy to make new ones. Outside of their spouses, typical new parents have less than 90 minutes per day of contact time with another adult. A whopping 34 percent spend their entire days in isolation.
Not surprisingly, many new parents feel trapped. Said one stay-at-home mother, “Some days, I just want to shut myself in my bedroom and talk on the phone with my best friend all day instead of dealing with my children. I love them, but being a stay-at-home mom is not all I dreamt it would be.” Another simply said of the loneliness: “I cry in my car. A lot.”
Belonging to multiple social groups is a critical buffer. But those relationships are most likely to collapse in the transition to parenthood. Women experience a disproportionate amount of this isolation, and there are biological reasons why it may be particularly toxic for them. Here’s the theory:
Birth—before the advent of modern medicine—often resulted in the mother’s death. Though no one knows the true figure, estimates run as high as one in eight. Tribes with females who could quickly relate to and trust nearby females were more likely to survive. Older females, with the wisdom of their prior birthing experiences, could care for new mothers. Women with kids could provide precious milk to a new baby if the birth mother died. Sharing and its accompanying social interactions thus provided a survival advantage, says anthropologist Sarah Hrdy (no, there’s no a in her last name). She calls it “alloparenting.” Consistent with this notion is the finding that we are the only primates who regularly let others take care of our children.
One mother put this need for social connections succinctly: “Sometimes when I’m holding my beautiful baby in my arms and we’re gazing lovingly at each other, I secretly wish that she would fall asleep so that I could check my email.”
Why female neighborliness and not male? Part of the reason may be molecular. Females release oxytocin as part of their normal response to stress, a hormone that increases a suite of biological behaviors termed “tend and befriend.” Men don’t do this. Their resident testosterone provides too much hormonal signal-to-noise, blunting the effects of their endogenous oxytocin. The hormone, which also acts as a neurotransmitter in both sexes, mediates feelings of trust and calm, perfect if you need to cement relationships with someone who may have to become a foster parent. Astonishingly, conveniently, and completely consistent with this notion, oxytocin is also involved in stimulating lactation.
Social relationships, it turns out, have deep evolutionary roots. You will not escape the need in your lifetime. Psychotherapist Ruthellen Josselson, who has studied “tend and befriend” relationships, underscores their importance: “Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women. We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other.”
3. Unequal workload
The third Grape of Wrath is pointedly illustrated by the painful testimony of a new mom I’ll call Melanie.
If my husband tells me one more time that he needs to rest because he “worked all day,” I will throw all of his clothes on the front lawn, kick his car into neutral and watch it roll away and I’ll sell all of his precious sports stuff on eBay for a dollar. And then I’ll kill him. He seriously doesn’t get it! Yes, he worked all day, but he worked with English speaking, potty trained, fully capable adults.
He didn’t have to change their diapers, give them naps and clean their lunch from the wall. He didn’t have to count to 10 to calm himself, he didn’t have to watch Barney 303,243,243 times, and he didn’t have to pop his boob out 6 times to feed a hungry baby and I KNOW he didn’t have peanut butter and jelly crust for lunch. He DID get TWO 15-minute breaks to “stroll,” an hour break to hit the gym, and a 1 hour train ride home to read or nap.
So maybe I don’t get a paycheck, maybe I stay in my sweatpants most of the day, maybe I only shower every 2 or 3 days, maybe I get to “play” with our kids all day … I still work a hell of a lot harder in one hour than he does all day. So take your paycheck, stick it in the bank and let me go get a freakin’ pedicure once a month without hearing you say “Maybe if you got a job … and had your own money.”
Ouch. And, I might add, bull’s-eye. I will give you fair warning: This next section is not going to be pleasant reading if you are a guy. But it may be the most important thing you read in this book.
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