Ties that bind
Why we love our kids so much
Love is an emotion usually associated with the heart, but the truth is, it’s all in the brain. You may not know it, but you have four different brains (well, ways of thinking) in your head, according to Nathan Wallis, a neuroscience educator and popular parenting expert.
Our first two brains are concerned with survival and movement. If you only have those two brains, you’re a reptile. To have brain number three, the ‘‘limbic emotional brain’’, you have to be a mammal. (Yes, mammals have emotions, they just experience them in a more basic sense.)
Brain number three is often called the mammal brain, but Wallis says its real name is the limbic system – which is where our feelings come from. This way of thinking is why we love our children.
Brain number four is the frontal cortex. That’s the brain humans have that animals don’t – strategic thinking, colours and numbers, language and literacy.
A human brain takes a very long time to fully develop (around their mid-20s for men, and early 20s for women).
A reptile can lay its eggs and ‘‘p... off’’, according to Wallis, because its offspring’s brain is ready when it is born. Human parents, on the other hand, need to love and nurture and protect their newborn baby while its brain grows.
Being genetically wired to love our children is an evolutionary advantage, says Karen Waldie, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Auckland.
Our offspring simply would not have survived long in the wild or in our caveman past without being loved and cared for. The ‘‘love’’ hormone oxytocin, which releases in humans when they become parents, also helps, Waldie says.
Biologically speaking, loving our children ensures their brains grow and thus, their survival, which also means we can carry on our genes.
Humans are also an interdependent species that survives much better and thrives in large familial groups.
What happens to our brain when we become a parent?
Many women report feeling a little foggy once they become pregnant. It is jokingly called ‘‘mum brain’’, and often involves forgetfulness and a general mental sluggishness.
The pregnancy fogginess continues into the newborn days, and it can be a long time before the mum feels as mentally sharp as she once was.
The lack of mental clarity is a side effect of a major brain reset that occurs when a person – female or male – becomes a parent.
‘‘Mum brain, or parent brain, is nature’s way of kind of shutting down the frontal cortex. That’s why we can’t remember where our keys are and why the wrong words are coming out,’’ Wallis says.
It’s not that your brain’s frontal cortex is weaker; your limbic system, your emotional brain, is just much stronger.
Studies show the longer ‘‘parent brain’’ lasts, the less likely the baby is to have anxiety and depression as a teenager, so it should be viewed as a gift, not a deficit, Wallis says.
Have humans always loved their kids the same way?
There is a commonly-held belief that medieval parents did not love and cherish their children the way modern parents do.
Research published by Barbara Tuchman in her award-winning 1978 book A Distant suggested that in medieval times, the investment of love in a young child was ‘‘suppressed’’.
Tuchman suspected this was due to the high infant mortality rates of the time. It was estimated that one or two in three children died. Her theory was that frequent childbearing due to a lack of contraception put less value on human life.
A Distant Mirror does include the occasional mention of love and care of small children. But Tuchman writes that on the whole, in medieval times, babies and young children appear to have been left to survive and die without great concern in the first five or six years.
Wallis thinks there is some truth to this story. ‘‘There was a cultural idea that if your child survived to five, then they were much more likely to live. So there was this idea that you didn’t attach too much before the age of five.’’
However, Miriam McCaleb, a child development expert, finds the theory questionable at best.
‘‘I’ve heard it before, that myth of how they used to keep their babies at arm’s length and not really fall in love with them, in case they died, like, that’s actual bull ..... I don’t see any biological evidence to show that that’s true.’’
Neuro-biologically, humans are very much in the shape that we were in about 250,000 years ago, McCaleb says.
Our ancestors must have loved and nurtured their babies, otherwise the human race would not have been able to adapt and survive and thrive the way it has.
McCaleb does accept that some parental ambivalence may have come about due to the medieval period being a transition time, economically and socially. The beginning of capitalism at that time altered humans’ relationships with their time, one another, work and wha¯ nau. That was the issue for overworked medieval parents, she says.
‘‘They didn’t love their babies any less than the cave people ancestors we all share loved theirs, or we love ours.’’
Waldie also believes it is plausible that medieval parents didn’t closely attach to their children until they were five because they thought they were more likely to survive after that.
Without birth control, there would always be ‘‘more’’ kids in the future if the small ones died. Many babies were not named immediately, due to fears they would soon die, she says.
Birth control and improvements in living standards have been a major driver of the changes for modern parents in affluent Western societies.
‘‘Modern parents have more invested in just one or two offspring, versus our greatgrandparents who might have had 10,’’ Waldie says.
Today’s parents have more time and money to spend on their children, while our greatgrandparents were more focused on simply putting food on the table and surviving winters.
What happens if kids aren’t loved?
If humans fail to love and nurture their babies in the early years of their lives as their brain develops, the results can be physically catastrophic.
To see the impact on a baby that is unloved and neglected, we can look at the brain scans of severely neglected babies in eastern European orphanages.
Their scans reveal holes in the orbitofrontal cortex – one of the regions of the human brain that is thought to be specific for developing empathy. Studies have also shown some children raised in Romanian orphanages have smaller brains. It is thought the smaller size is due to a loss of connections and loss of cells.
A more common scenario is when a parent experiences postnatal depression and fails to feel any emotion for the child, Wallis says.
Parents with postnatal depression report the difficulties in looking after an object that you don’t feel any emotion for.
‘‘You’re looking after an object that is just draining you and requiring all of this attention that you’re getting no reward from, no dopamine and stuff, [and] we need that love in order to make the job rewarding.
‘‘It’s bloody hard work being a parent, you wouldn’t do it without the love.’’
‘‘Mum brain, or parent brain, is nature’s way of kind of shutting down the frontal cortex. That’s why we can’t remember where our keys are and why the wrong words are coming out.’’ Nathan Wallis