If you’re a parent, you likely have experienced times where the crying of your baby instantly puts you on alert. If you’re a breastfeeding parent, you may already know that lactation hormones heighten your reactivity to your baby’s cries.
A parent’s responsiveness to their crying baby is a tale as old as time. But modern babies are uniquely triggering to modern parents, in ways that babies in the past weren’t.
I have pseudo triplets with my wife (she carried a singleton, I carried twins, due dates 10 days apart), and just one baby with colic increases a new mother’s risk of developing postpartum depression. I had three newborn babies–and two had colic (the twins).
Us parents called from 7pm-11pm the witching hour because the twins spent almost that entire time crying (upon researching, I found the witching hour is a common parent experience).
I’ve been an early childhood educator for over fifteen years — as a Montessori teacher or as a nanny to young children — so crying babies are nothing new to me. I knew that a baby’s crying is harder for their own parents.
But having triplet newborns opened my eyes to the wild effect of new parent hormones and how sensitive that made me to my children’s cries. Learning about the specific hormonal impact of our baby’s screams on us parents can foster self-compassion for our own biological responses, and support in understanding the unique stressors that exist for modern parents.
Ultimately, understanding and compassion can help us parents develop coping mechanisms to best support ourselves as well as our babies during difficult periods.
Here are five ways where your baby’s cries will affect you — and how these five ways are particularly difficult for modern families due to American culture.
A parent’s nervous system responds differently than a non-parent’s, no matter how you became a parent.
When a parent hears their baby cry, they have a heightened neural activation in the areas of the brain that process and feel emotions and empathy, compared to non-parents.
This is part of why phantom crying — a phenomenon where a parent is so on alert that they hear their baby crying even when the baby isn’t — is such a common (if stressful) phenomenon.
There have been many studies on mothers (both breastfeeding and formula feeding) and their nervous system and brain response to their babies, but not as many studies on fathers (or adoptive/non-birth parents).
However, new research shows that all parents (biological, gestational, adoptive, or otherwise) experience huge hormonal shifts and brain changes when they become a parent, directly in proportion to the time they spend with their baby during the first several months.
Jill Mailing, an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), holistic sleep coach and early parenting educator who owns Integrative Lactation Care and Supported Sleep, sees the impact of these changes all the time in her practice.
“All parents, especially those who have given birth to an infant, are wired to respond to a crying baby,” she said. “Since human babies are born the most vulnerable of any mammal species (we can’t run, walk, or even see at birth!), we evolved to keep our caregivers close. Physical proximity – being able to hear an adult’s warmth and feel their heartbeat – is how we knew we were safe.”
Breastfeeding parents experience a unique hormonal cascade that creates even more reactivity to cries.
Although parents of all genders and types can experience the incredibly sensitive brain
plasticity of new parenthood, pregnancy gives a jumpstart to this sensitive brain plasticity. A pregnant parent experiences new brain circuits and rewiring during their pregnancy in preparation for their child. Parents who don’t give birth experience these changes after the baby is born.
If the pregnant parent goes on to breastfeed, those parents have an especially sensitive response to the cry of their infant in particular.
MRIs of postpartum mothers compared the brains of exclusively breastfeeding (EBF) mothers to formula feeding mothers, and found that EBF mothers had greater activation in multiple brain areas (such as the amygdala and insula) in response to their babies crying. MRIs also showed that parents of all types — the pregnant mother who formula feeds, a father, etc — can differentiate their baby’s cry from a strange baby’s cry, and respond much more quickly and sensitively. Although breastfeeding is a crazy, cool thing that the human body does to nurture our babies — I think it’s so important to point out that lactation is one way the body provides intense hormones to nurture our babies, but it’s by no means the only way.
There are many circumstances where it’s better or even lifesaving for a family to combo feed or formula feed. An important study that determines lactating mothers experience stronger protective hormone surges in regards to perceived threats to their kids also emphasizes that all mothers, of all types, exhibit protective behavior to their young–whether they’re breastfeeding or not. Maternal protection is fostered in multiple ways, and lactation is just one of those ways.
But lactation is a powerful process, and understanding its hormonal impact on a newly postpartum parent can lend valuable compassion when hormones are raging and tears are flowing–whether your baby’s or your own!
A parent’s own infancy can impact our parenthood, even though it happened decades ago.
Modern neuroscience indicates that all us adults bear epigenetic markers in our own brain from the way we were parented by our parents — and these influence the way we respond
to our babies as their parents. If your childhood upbringing didn’t demonstrate high nurture, or had areas that were lacking, then it might take particular intentionality on your part to break those generational patterns and create a new pattern for how you want to respond to your baby.
The good news is that patrescence or matrescence (new parenthood) creates plasticity in the brain unlike any other period of development except adolescence and infancy: it is a time where your brain is especially sensitive to rewiring; the most sensitive period in adulthood.
Parenthood creates huge changes in the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus–all areas associated with emotions and nurture. This means for parents who want to create new patterns in their family, the brain is primed to support them in this.
America has a low-nurture culture for babies, setting parents up to fail.
A low-nurture culture, prevalent in Western countries, is defined by neuroscientist Dr. Greer Kirshenbaum as cultures that, “lack support or acknowledgement of the rights and needs of parents and babies.”
Low-nurture for babies in America includes common baby-rearing advice like separating a baby from their mother at birth, require them to sleep independently during the first year of life, minimize babyholding and parent-child play by putting them in “containers” such as bouncers and swings and not feeding on demand.
A culture’s stories about how we “should” raise our babies has an incredible influence on how we parent. Countless parent influencers and pediatricians still tout these low-nurture or even harmful beliefs, even though it is indisputable that placing the baby on their mother directly after birth (when possible) is invaluable for bonding and health; that the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly advises parents to roomshare with their baby till six months at a minimum; container baby syndrome is a well-documented worrisome trend; and many organizations such as La Leche International and the CDC recommend feeding on demand.
America has a low-nurture culture for parents.
The Surgeon General’s recent August advisory, calling the American people’s immediate attention to the urgent public health issue of parental stress and mental health, could not be any clearer on this topic.
To be a high-nurture culture for parents — a culture that valued the work that parents are doing with their children, and provided practical support so parents could do the best job at parenting as possible — according to the recent data in this advisory, our culture would:
A. Create child care subsidies, child income tax credits, universal preschool, and early childhood education programs.
B. Establish a national paid family and medical leave program and ensure all workers have paid sick time.
C. Ensure parents and caregivers have access to high-quality mental health care.
D. Reduce poverty, prevent adverse childhood experiences, increase access to healthy food, and provide affordable housing.
“We were NEVER meant to parent in isolation,” Mailing said. “Find community. This is why I run a free support group once a week — I remember how hard it was to be a pandemic parent with a newborn, and how long the days felt when at home struggling to nurse my kiddo. Every parent needs to have multiple spaces they can go to during the week to just BE with other people who accept them and their baby as they are.” (Check out her Ann Arbor recommendations for support groups and playgroups here!)
How are these hormonal and societal influences so difficult for modern American parents?
American culture doesn’t prioritize parents’ wellbeing, not when it requires sacrifices from someone else.
RELATED: Local Mom of Triplets Shares Why Maternal Mental Health Month Matters
The first three months of a child’s life, especially for the mother-infant dyad, are one of the most crucial; yet I can’t tell you how many friends I know who were forced to go back to work sooner than three months because paternity leave wasn’t protected, or they needed an income during that time period, or their job didn’t qualify for FMLA protections and they would lose their job if they didn’t.
Simply put, babies want to be around their parents — and parents want to be around their babies. The hormonal influences on new parent brains drive parents to be around their babies — and stress them out when they’re forced apart too soon.
Mailing reminds us, “This is why so many newborns cry as soon as they are put down! Their evolutionary wiring believes a lion could come along at any moment – they don’t know they are safe and sound within the walls of a 21st century home.”
But because of the lack of societal infrastructure to protect new parents’ time, often parent bonding is quickly shunted to evenings and weekends, far sooner than parents (or babies) are ready.
American culture doesn’t guard new parenthood as a sacred space. New parents aren’t surrounded by a village of experienced older parents and enthusiastic peers to do all the other tasks while the parents just spend time with their baby; to provide the stillness and time for challenges and triggers from the new parents’ own lives emerge and for the parents to be held gently while they undo those triggers and provide a better experience for their babies.
And new parents certainly don’t have a village supporting them to have the time and ability to hold and nurture their baby constantly, or to give them to other caregivers when they need a break.
American parents have to put their babies in bouncers because they need to make dinner; they have to leave their baby and go to work because they need to provide for their family; they have to sleep train because we need sleep to survive and we don’t have support at night.
“How could we NOT be triggered when we are caring for an incredibly vulnerable human with round-the-clock needs while still trying to heal from birth, ALONE?” Mailing said.
“It’s a completely unfair deal — and instead of preparing parents for it in pregnancy with targeted, strategic education & community-building, we bombard them with all that capitalism has to offer: smart bassinets, baby swings, fancy pacifiers & swaddles, apps & programs that promise a child can sleep through the night by 12 weeks, and more. Then, when these things ultimately cause downstream issues (which they do — I see them daily in my practice), we are somehow surprised.”
This is not how we were meant to parent. “We evolved within a village setting,” Mailing said. “where we had ample help of adults and older children to help care for infants and toddlers. In some hunter-gatherer tribes that have been studied, infants are passed around TWO TO EIGHT TIMES AN HOUR.” This is obviously a far cry from a new mum left alone with her baby a few weeks after birth.
If a baby shines a light on the gaps in a new parent’s support infrastructure, triplets blast a floodlight on them.
In some ways I was lucky — I had family and in-laws who would take monthly trips to help out in those first months, which is more than some parents have.
But I by no means could rely on consistent help. Days or more might go by where no one stopped in. Where my wife or I had to negotiate who would be left alone with three screaming babies while someone speedily cooked dinner. (Sometimes this meant we didn’t eat; we’d just scarf down a hunk of cheese and call it good.)
The breastfeeding hormones affected me more strongly than any hormonal experience I’ve ever had. Being away from my babies for longer than an hour caused a pain that was almost physical.
But having three babies meant I didn’t even get the breaks a singleton parent (even without support) could rely on throughout the day. By the time I settled three babies down for a nap, the first one was awake again. By the time I finished breastfeeding all babies, the first one was hungry again. Some nights, the most sleep I got was two fragmented hours — and then I still had to function all the next day with gentleness and patience, rather than screaming and crying my own self.
America’s parenting culture sets parents up to fail — but despite that, countless parents are doing their best everyday to show up and be their for their kids, even with minimal to no village support.
For me, I find lots of solidarity in reading parenting articles and following parenting accounts of fellow parents who are trying to raise their child in a high-nurture environment, despite our current modern world working against them. (If this is you, feel free to connect with me, I’m @motownmultiples!)
Maybe someday we’ll have a culture that’s nurturing and supportive of new families.
But for now, may us parents have compassion for ourselves as we recognize, this is not how we were meant to parent — but we’re still doing it anyway.
