Brain Rules for Baby (11 page)

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.”

The third Grape of Wrath is pointedly illustrated by the painful testimony of a new mom I’ll call Melanie.

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.

Along with sleep loss and social isolation, there is a whopping disparity in who does the housework in the transition to parenthood. Simply put, women get saddled with most of it. It doesn’t matter if the woman is also working or how many children the couple has. Even with 21st-century changes in attitudes, women still do more of virtually everything domestic. As civil-rights activist Florynce Kennedy once said, “Any woman who still thinks marriage is a fifty-fifty proposition is only proving that she doesn’t understand either men or percentages.”

Melanie’s complaint illustrates that this imbalance has a corrosive effect on the quality of a marriage. Which means it is fully capable of negatively affecting a baby’s brain development. I told you this would not be pleasant reading.

Here are the numbers: Women with families do 70 percent of all household tasks. Dishes, dirt, diapers, minor household repairs, all of it. These data are often couched as good news, for 30 years ago the figure was 85 percent. But it doesn’t take a math major to know these figures aren’t equal. Household duties increase three times as much for women as for men when baby comes home.

The lack of contribution is so great that having a husband around actually creates an
extra
seven hours of work per week for women
.
That’s not true the other way around. A wife
saves
her husband about
an hour of housework per week. Says one young mother, “I sometimes fantasize about getting divorced just so I can have every other weekend off.”

Women spend a whopping 39 hours per week performing work related to child care. Today’s dad spends about half that—21.7 hours a week. This is usually couched as good news, too, for it is triple the amount of time guys spent with kids in the ’60s. Yet no one would call this equal, either. It is also still true that about 40 percent of dads spend two hours or less per workday with their kids, and 14 percent spend less than an hour.

This imbalance in workload—along with financial conflicts, which may be related—is one of the most frequently cited sources of marital conflict. It plays a significant factor in a woman’s opinion of the man she married, especially if he pulls the “I am the breadwinner card” as Melanie’s husband did. The financials speak loudly here. A typical stay-at-home mom works 94.4 hours per week. If she were paid for her efforts, she would earn about $117,000 per year. (This is a calculation of hourly compensation and time spent per task for the 10 job titles moms typically perform in American households, including housekeeper, van driver, day-care provider, staff psychologist, and chief executive officer.) Most guys do not spend 94.4 hours a week at their jobs. And 99 percent of them earn less than $117,000 per year.

This may explain why, in the vast majority of cases, the increase in hostile interactions usually starts with the woman and spreads to the man. Which brings us to a little book that may provide a clue to the cure. My wife got it as a gift from a friend. It is titled
Porn for Women.
It’s a picture book of hunks, photographed in all their chiseled, muscle-bound, testosterone-marinated, PG-rated glory. Lots of naked chests and low-cut jeans, complete with tousled hair and beckoning eyes. And they are ALL doing housework.

There’s a picture of a well-cut Adonis, and he’s loading the washing machine. The caption reads: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can
relax.” There’s another hunk, the cover guy, vacuuming the floor. A particularly athletic-looking man peers up from the sports section and declares, “Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair”.

Porn for Women
. Available at a marriage near you.

What to make of the transition to parenthood? We have so far outlined an experience that requires a “giving response” three times per minute, allows half the sleep you need, provides little energy for friendships, and turns issues like who takes out the garbage into divorce risks. If these aren’t perfect conditions from which to ferment our final Grape of Wrath, I don’t know what are. Our fourth subject is depression. Fortunately, the majority of you won’t experience it, but it is serious enough to warrant attention.

About half of all new mothers experience a transient postpartum sadness that vanishes in a few hours or days. These baby blues are typical. But another 10 percent to 20 percent of mothers experience something much deeper and infinitely more troubling. These women are dogged by feelings of deepening despair, sorrow, and worthlessness, even if their marriages are doing well. Such painful, bewildering feelings last for weeks and months. Afflicted mothers cry all the time or simply stare out the window. They may stop eating. They may eat too much. These mothers are becoming clinically depressed, a condition known as postpartum depression. Though plenty of controversy rages about its sources and the criteria used to diagnose it, there is no controversy about the solution.

Women experiencing overwhelming anxiety, moodiness, or sadness require intervention. Left untreated, the consequences of postpartum depression can be tragic, ranging from a severe drop in quality of life to infanticide and suicide. Left untreated, postpartum depression also will debilitate the lively, interactive bonds that are supposed to develop between parent and child in the earliest months.
Instead, the baby begins mirroring the mother’s depressive actions. It’s called reciprocal withdrawal. These children become more insecure, socially inhibited, timid, and passive—about twice as fearful on average as children raised by mothers who aren’t depressed. The damage is still observable 14 months after birth.

It’s not just the woman who’s at risk for depression. Between one tenth and one quarter of all new dads become depressed when baby is born. If the woman is also depressed, that figure goes up to 50 percent. Not a pretty picture of bringing a baby home, is it?

Happily, this is not the complete picture.

A common comment I hear from parents when I lecture on brain development is “Nobody told me it was going to be so hard”. I do not wish to minimize the hardness of the transition to parenthood, but I wish to offer some perspective on it.

One of the reasons veteran parents don’t focus on the hardness of having babies is that “hard” is not the whole story. It’s not even the major part. The time you will actually spend with your kids is breathtakingly short. They will change very quickly. Eventually, your child will find a sleep schedule, turn to you for comfort, and learn from you both what to do and what not to do. Then he or she will leave you and start an independent life.

What you will take away from the experience will not be how hard having a baby was but how vulnerable to it you became. Author Elizabeth Stone once said, “Making a decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

Veteran parents have experienced the sleepless nights, but they’ve also experienced the exhilaration of a first bike ride, a first graduation, and, for some, a first grandchild. They’ve experienced the rest of the story. They know it’s worth it.

There’s more good news. Couples who know about the Four Grapes of Wrath and who begin preparing in advance are much less likely to trample on them once the baby comes home. When conflicts occur for these couples, the effects are usually much milder.

I can attest to that. I grew up in a military household in the 1950s. Whenever we took a car ride, my mother scrambled to prepare two kids under 3 years of age for the excursion, assembling blankets, bottles, diapers, and clean clothes. My father never assisted and actually grew impatient if preparations took too long. Storming out of the house, he would plunk down in the driver’s seat and gun the engine to announce his irritation. Lots of strong feelings there, about as useful as a heart attack.

I only dimly recalled this behavior as an adult. But six months into my own marriage, my wife and I were late to a grad school meet-and-greet dinner. She was taking an especially long time to get ready, and I grew impatient. I stormed out of the house, got into the car, and put the key into the ignition. All of a sudden it hit me what I was doing.

I remember taking a long breath, marveling how deeply parents can
still
influence their kids, and then recalling novelist James Baldwin’s quote: “Children have never been good at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them”. Slowly, I removed the keys from the ignition, returned to my new bride, and apologized. I never pulled that stunt again.

Years later, getting ready for a trip with two kids of our own, I was putting our youngest in the car seat when suddenly his diaper exploded. I grinned as I felt my car keys in my pocket and repaired to the changing table, humming. There would be no gunning of an engine. The lesson was long-lasting, the change surprisingly easy to maintain.

There is nothing particularly heroic about this story. Nothing really changed except a specific awareness. But it is this awareness that I want to share, for its inner workings have very powerful positive consequences. Researchers know how to make the transition to parenting easier on couples, and I wish to not only tell you how but to testify that it really works. As long as you are willing to put in some effort, babies are not some terminal disease from which no marriage safely recovers. As of this writing, I am into my 30th year of marriage, and my children are near teenagers. These have been the best years of my life.

The story of the car keys involves a change in perspective, which is captured in one of our Brain Rules: “What is obvious to you is obvious to you. My father did not see what needed to be done to get the kids ready (and may not have wanted to help even if he did). But my mother saw very clearly what needed to be done. There was a “perceptual asymmetry” in their points of view. It led to some really nasty fights.

In 1972, sociologists Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett hypothesized that perceptual asymmetry lay at the heart of most conflicts. They further suggested that bridging this asymmetry would assist in most conflict resolutions. They were right. Their key observation was this: People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints, but they view other people’s behaviors as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits. The classic example is the job candidate who arrives late for an interview. The candidate ascribes his tardiness to situations beyond his control (being caught in traffic). The interviewer ascribes his tardiness to personal irresponsibility (not taking traffic into account). One invokes a situational constraint to explain being late. The other invokes an insult.

Nisbett and colleagues have been cataloguing these asymmetries for decades. Nisbett found that people tend to have inflated views
of themselves and their futures. They think they’re more likely than they actually are to become wealthy, have a brighter occupational future, and are somehow less likely to contract infectious diseases (one reason illnesses like cancer can be so emotionally devastating is that people never think it will happen to them, only to the “other guy”). People overestimate how much they can learn about others from short encounters. When fighting, people believe
they
are perfectly unbiased, informed, and objective, while simultaneously thinking their
opponents
are hopelessly prejudiced, clueless, and subjective.