There are few areas in parenting more fraught with anxiety than feeding children. But a new study suggests that if your child is a fussy eater, it may be largely genetic, rather than a result of your terrible parenting. For parents with children who shun their greens, this may come as a relief.
Even if a study like this one won’t help me persuade my children to eat more vegetables, I can’t get enough of good scientific reports when it comes to issues around motherhood, parenthood and childhood. They can be a soothing poultice in a world of feverish ideology and myth – and with a long history of mother-blaming.
When I entered the institution of motherhood, I was surprised by the prevalence of unscientific advice, misinformation, even quackery: from conflicting antenatal messages about the use of pain relief in labour, to falsities about breastfeeding. I was taken aback by how unevidenced some of the information was – often the data was simply not there. There is very little research into the transition to motherhood, and ideology often fills the vacuum.
Leading child-rearing books are often filled with opinion held up as fact. And the amount of conflicting advice about parenting is perhaps larger than it’s ever been. There is a heavy focus on the behaviour and choices of the individual parent – often the mother in early years – with little to no consideration of the role of the father or partner or family, wider society or government policy. To say nothing of the way the actual health and wellbeing of the new mother is often ignored.
Thank goodness, then, for those who are using scientific methods to find out what is, in fact, what.
Take the maternal brain. Before my kids were born, all I knew was that “mum brain” supposedly meant forgetfulness or a kind of neural sludge. But in early motherhood, apart from periods of intense sleep deprivation, my brain didn’t feel slower, just different. In fact, in some ways it felt faster and more open.
The cliched concept of “mum/baby brain” has its roots in the 19th-century idea that women were intellectually enfeebled by their ability to bear children, and this obviously flawed thinking has persisted into the modern day. But now a raft of studies – the most recent showing a detailed map of the human brain across gestation led by Emily Jacobs at the University of California, Santa Barbara – is putting the simplistic idea to bed while giving new parents much-needed information. In short: the brain during pregnancy and new parenthood undergoes a remarkable and complex metamorphosis that Jacobs and her colleagues suggest is a kind of “fine-tuning” in preparation for parenthood. To suggest this is “baby brain” or a cognitive impairment is reductive and wrong.
Crucially, this work may lead to much-needed insight into postnatal depression, pre-eclampsia and other health problems. And now that we finally have the neuroscience showing both the complex changes and extensive impact of pregnancy and new motherhood on the brain, perhaps we can build a society that cares for care-givers – for instance by ensuring social support to reduce stress during this crucial time.
Even if science won’t change social policy overnight, it can and does have the power to change the emotional and social day-to-day experience of parenthood.
New mothers often blame themselves for struggling within the conditions of late-stage capitalism and its rose-tinted maternal ideals. Since writing my book Matrescence – named after the anthropological term for the whole period of transition to motherhood – and hearing from hundreds of new parents, I’ve seen how common and corrosive shame is and how it makes people internalise their problems. This prevents people from connecting with each other, or asking for help. I’ve also seen how the emerging science of matrescence can provide liberation and relief, by helping people make sense of how they feel.
For instance, I had thought that the nuclear family structure was in some way “natural” and that there was something wrong with me for finding long days alone with a new baby difficult. The freedom and autonomy that I have benefited from in my privileged life could not hold the baby while I fed myself or used the loo.
While trying to understand why modern motherhood seemed to be so hard for myself and the people around me, I found the science of evolutionary anthropology life-changing. I hadn’t realised that the way we raise children in the global north – in nuclear units – is utterly different to 95% of our evolutionary history, when we mainly lived in small groups.
Our brains and our nervous systems evolved in societies arranged around collective child-rearing. I learned from the legendary Sarah Blaffer Hrdy that a lone foraging woman would simply not have been able to supply the 10m to 13m calories a human child would need to eat before it could find food independently; they needed help, and got it from their immediate community. I came to understand that the way my society had designed modern motherhood was actually very weird.
Knowing that we are living in what researchers call an “evolutionary mismatch” can alleviate some of the shame and guilt around high societal maternal ideals. And other data is soothing as well. Learning, for example, that mothers spend twice as much time looking after their children every day compared with the 1960s, while also working more, might explain how the structures of care-giving in our economic environment lead to stress, rather than it being a moral failing.
The lifting of shame might sound like a trivial, individual matter, but perhaps scientific understanding in this context will be a pathway to a change in material and economic conditions. Shame is disconnecting, and can lead to withdrawal, loneliness and ill health. But scientists can help illuminate the reality of the caregiving experience, which is hidden in the private sphere. Remove the obstacle and power is released (perhaps that’s the point of the obstacle?).
Social and cultural norms are hard to see. But myths can be harmful. And science helps us to see more clearly that our societies are failing to support or recognise those raising children in a meaningful way – and that maybe I shouldn’t feel so bad if my kids only like peas.
