Becoming a mother is a life-changing event, bringing out hormones and natural tendencies in a woman that help prepare her during the nine months until the child is born. Nature has ensured that women are ready when the baby finally arrives, kicking and screaming, through a progression of hormones that flow through her body and her brain during gestation.
But what about the men?
“Parenthood is exactly the kind of event that you might expect to harness the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to help prepare individuals for the adventure that awaits,” says Kayt Sukel, author of Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships (Free Press, 2012). “Given the sheer number of physical changes that a woman goes through, you’d expect that some major rewiring might be happening in the brain. But work in animal models suggests that dad’s brains are getting a bit of a reorg, too.”