The Deep Misogyny of the "Maternal Instinct"

How one flawed assumption has shaped parenting beliefs and advice for centuries.

Today I’m thrilled to be running a Q&A with public health journalist Chelsea Conaboy, author of the important new book Mother Brain: How Neuroscience is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood. You may have seen her provocative (and excellent) op-ed in The New York Times a few weeks ago, “Maternal Instinct is a Myth that Men Created,” which was an adapted excerpt from her book. In it, she argues that the idea of the “maternal instinct” — the notion that women are uniquely suited to raising children based in part on how pregnancy and motherhood change the brain — is a farce. The “maternal instinct” has been touted as a scientific certainty, when in fact, it’s rooted in sexist ideology — one that has had many negative social consequences.

Mother Brain articulates (and debunks) many deeply held misogynistic biases and assumptions at the root of our culture’s inability to provide adequate postpartum care, parental leave and reproductive rights. It also has implications for how we talk about parenting, how we support parents, and how we consider certain forms of parenting advice (some of it is very, very sexist).

Below is a fascinating conversation I recently had with her about these issues, but I urge you to buy Mother Brain and read the whole thing — it’s chock full of history and insights that will change how you think about parenting.

Chelsea, I loved your book. One of your key arguments is that motherhood doesn't change the brain; parenting does —  that "maternal behavior" is a basic human characteristic, not unique to mothers or people who biologically gestate and bear children. And you go further, too, arguing that this isn't even just a human phenomenon: Parenting-induced changes happen in many animals' brains, regardless of their sex. Can you summarize a few of the key pieces of evidence you came across that helped to convince you that there isn't, in fact, a "maternal instinct" that is unique to mothers?

Sure. This really comes from the foundational work of Jay Rosenblatt and colleagues. He is considered by many to be the "father" of this field. It's his words I borrowed in describing maternal behavior as a basic characteristic of the species. He wrote that about the rats that he studied. Rosenblatt's research laid out the idea that the development of maternal behavior is a process that requires exposure to young, and not only the hormonal shifts of pregnancy. And, back in the 1960s, Rosenblatt found that male rats would demonstrate maternal behavior, including nest-building and crouching over pups as if to nurse, given some exposure to the young. That's true even though rats in the wild would not be involved with raising pups. Virgin females responded similarly, after time spent with pups, even though they hadn't been primed for that behavior by pregnancy.

So many of his early findings around maternal behavior have been confirmed and built upon in the study of the parental brain in humans and in other animals. The brain is incredibly plastic during new parenthood, babies are powerful stimuli, and experience matters, a lot.

Importantly, other parents are changed by exposure to babies, too. This is particularly evident in the study of fathers. One study of gay and straight fathers found a kind of dosage effect — the more time a father spent directly responsible for his child's care, the greater connectivity researchers found between the amygdala and a cortical region thought to be involved in reading and responding to another person's social cues. Another paper was just published looking at fathers' brains over time — before and after their partners gave birth—and found significant volume changes within a network also associated with a person's ability to understand their own mental states and others'.

I looked at Rosenblatt's work and all that has come since, over half a century, and I kept coming back to the question, why aren't we talking about this science, about how we become parents — this critical developmental stage? I think it's because of the staying power of the idea of maternal instinct and the belief that it is science. I started looking back at the history, where that idea came from and how it entered scientific theory. I read the work of women like anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and historians Marga Vicedo and Kimberly Hamlin. And I realized that the idea of maternal instinct as a caregiving ability that is wholly innate, automatic and distinctly female came from ideology — belief — not science.

I feel like this is such important information to get out to moms, because it means it's okay — and totally normal — if you don't feel like a "natural mom" or you don't instinctively know what you're doing. It's good for dads to hear this, too, because if parenting is a skill that is learned through experience, then dads who feel like they're flailing maybe just need to get out and do it more. I can't help but notice some parallels here with growth mindset: When we tell kids they're naturally good at something, this often undermines their well-being and motivation if they later find it challenging. Whereas when we tell them that skill comes with practice, and with failing, they are much more willing to persevere through challenges. What are some ways we should change our language surrounding parenting to normalize parenting challenges and make it easier for even struggling parents to feel successful? (This is not to downplay the seriousness of postpartum depression and other postpartum conditions, of course, which can't be "fixed" with better language or more parenting experience!)

You're right about that last bit, but some percentage of postpartum depression diagnoses might be avoided if we gave those parents more support. And to do that, I think we have to acknowledge parenthood as a major upheaval for the brain that almost always involves some degree of psychological distress. Which I guess answers the first part of your question, too. We spend so much time talking about the material and logistical preparations for a baby. And once they arrive, the focus is so much on child development. I hope we can also start talking about this time as a major stage of development for parents, too.

I know I would have benefited from that. I experienced pretty significant anxiety after my first son was born, and I thought something was wrong with me, that the maternal instinct that was supposed to give me a sense of equilibrium was missing or broken. Once I started digging into this research and recognizing that at least some of that worry was related to the hyper-responsiveness that comes in those first months and is part of an adaptive process, my mindset and my sense of myself as a mother changed completely.

So much parenting advice, especially around bonding with a baby, can feel formulaic, as if certain steps lead to a healthy attachment, and if you deviate from those steps, you can try to repair things, but it won't be the same. And that's just not really how it works — of course! Human families and their social contexts are incredibly diverse. But yet, we're often made to feel like there's a Right Way. There isn't. There are many different ways those postpartum days can go. There are many ways those first moments and days and weeks can feel. What our babies need, specifically, is our attention. And what we, as parents, need is the support necessary to provide it. Prioritizing those two things should change our policymaking, our clinical care and the way we talk to one another about what it means to become a parent. 

How has society's widespread belief in the maternal instinct shaped parenting advice over the ages? I have to admit, my jaw kind of dropped when you unpacked some of the sexist beliefs at the core of attachment theory. (For those who don’t know, attachment theory, which was developed by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, is a theory that argues for the importance of parental — usually maternal — empathy, responsiveness and touch. It gave rise to pediatrician William Sears’s popular philosophy of “attachment parenting,” which, among other things, encourages mothers to have near constant body-to-body contact with their babies.)

Maternal instinct is a rigid idea. An instinct, by definition, is a fixed pattern of behavior. Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who presented himself as an expert on human bonding based on his work in geese, often described instinct using a lock-and-key metaphor. He strongly influenced John Bowlby and Bowlby's writing of attachment theory. This is something Marga Vicedo writes about extensively. Bowlby's work was important in many ways. He completely remade how we think of infancy, for the better. But he also presented a mother as someone who shaped her child's development not only through her behavior but through a particular kind of maternal love, and he emphasized that above all else, while practically ignoring the broader social context of a family's life or the developmental needs of a mother herself. He wrote that separation between mother and baby was a lot like smoking or radiation. Even small doses were cumulative, so “the safest dose is a zero dose.”

I think it's hard to overstate how much Bowlby's work has shaped parenting advice in the decades since, and the degree to which our conceptualization of a healthy infancy is based on the devotion and presence of a mother, without much consideration at all for social context or the rest of the family. It certainly has shaped public policy in the U.S. and the refusal by men in power to create a federal paid leave policy, leaving us as one of only six countries in the world that doesn't have paid maternity leave. It makes mothers seem ready-made — a lock waiting for its key — and it fuels opposition to abortion and reproductive rights more broadly. It promotes discrimination against families that don't include a gestational mother. It amplifies racism and classism toward anyone who doesn't perform an "ideal" maternal instinct. And it is behind so much maternal anxiety about whether our behaviors and our emotions match this ideal, and what it says about us as mothers if they don't.

You make the important point that babies in many human societies, as well as in other species, are often raised by individuals who are not their mothers (and/or are raised by groups of individuals, including the mothers). In other words, the idea that females are supposed to do most or all of the parenting is not rooted in the facts of evolutionary history. Can you share a couple of examples of what you call "alloparenting," including telling us a bit about the "grandmother hypothesis", which I found fascinating?

We only have to look around us, in our neighborhoods and our school communities and in our own homes to see examples of alloparenting ("allo" from the Greek word for "other"). This is parenting by anyone other than the person who carried the baby. There's a fair amount of variability across mammals in involvement from fathers or others in childrearing. Certainly, maternal care dominates, but it is not the only way.

In about 20 percent of primate species, mothers get help from other adults. In some monkey species, fathers care for the young most of the time. But the vast majority of time those other adults are helpers, sometimes inconsequential ones. Humans are different.

Early humans, unlike other apes, started having children close together. Which meant that a mother's baby was nowhere near ready to support themselves before the next newborn arrived. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and colleagues have proposed that those early human mothers were able to do that successfully because they had help from their own mothers who lived just past their own reproductive years (another difference from apes, who don't experience menopause). Helpful grandmothers willing and able to devote attention to their grandchildren increased their daughters' reproductive success, passed along their own genes for longer living and ensured that those babies' brains developed in a super-social context, with multiple adults learning and tending to their needs and letting their own minds be known, too. It may be that the work of those early grandmothers really opened the door to alloparenting in humans, making us as adults more inclined to have our attention and motivation captured by a baby, even if we didn't birth them. 

Scientists have suggested the fundamental circuitry that supports parental care may be present in all individuals across mammalian species, regardless of sex, and that it acts as a kind of evolutionary lever adjusted according to a species' changing context. That way, parental care and cooperative care can develop when it's needed.

I think it's really notable that, for human babies, mothers have always been important. And they have never been enough.

How has your reporting shaped your own parenting — and your self-compassion as a parent?

It's helped me to be more patient with myself. As I mentioned, it reframed my experience of brand new motherhood. But it has really changed how I feel about myself now too, as a parent of kids who are 5 and 7. I spent a lot of the pandemic grappling with these ideas that were deeply ingrained, especially around attachment theory and this sense that my connection to my children was supposed to feel a certain way. That process was honestly kind of awful (at a time when so many things felt awful). But I'm so grateful for it. I've taken much better stock of the strengths and challenges I had coming into this stage of life and how they have changed and continue to change. I have a much deeper understanding of my kids as individuals and our connection as particular to us. And it's beautiful.

Also, I have a deeper understanding of the role that mistakes play in shaping the parental brain. The brain's big job is to predict our needs and, as parents, to predict our kids' needs, too. And you don't get accurate predictions without prediction errors. It's so silly and simple, but it's really helpful to think about parenting mistakes as opportunities rather than a flaw in the design of my ancient, rigid maternal instinct.

Related posts from Is My Kid the Asshole?:

• Why Women Bear So Much of the Domestic Burden

• How to Be a Feminist Dad

• How to Talk to Kids about Abortion

• Four Etiquette Rules I’m Not Teaching My Kids

In last week’s Well newsletter for The New York Times, I wrote about how to keep healthy during the upcoming flu season. Because yes…. it’s coming (in some states, it’s already here!), and it’s likely to be a bad one. Read it here.