How Parenting Affects Brain Structure: Becoming a parent actually changes your brain, but does it affect intelligence? What this new study reveals may surprise you

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Many new mothers have felt forgetfulness, mental exhaustion, or struggle to focus taking the best out of them, especially in the post-partum days. For many years, mothers have described feeling mentally slower after welcoming babies into their lives, and that’s where the concept of “Baby Brain” came into existence. The widely popular term suggested that pregnancy could shrink the brain and negatively affect mental abilities. While researchers studying new parents have found that becoming a parent significantly changes the brain, however, the changes do not have anything to do with cognitive aspects.

Scientists found something unexpected

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Researchers from the Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health presented the study at the Women’s and Children’s Health Summit in Melbourne. The study reportedly followed around 300 new parents and 100 non-parents over two years and examined different aspects of cognitive performance.

According to a report in The Sunday Morning Herald, lead author of the study and Associate Professor Sharna Jamadar says, “New parents are not actually performing worse than non-parents. They just feel like that.” According to the researchers, parents may feel mentally overwhelmed, but that does not necessarily mean their intelligence has declined.

Parenthood does change the brain but not in a harmful way

The research explained that parenthood causes major structural changes in the brain, especially during pregnancy and after childbirth. But these changes are not signs of brain damage or dysfunction. According to the researchers, these changes actually help mothers adapt better to the emotional and psychological demands of raising a child.

Do fathers experience these changes too

Interestingly, the study also examined fathers and found that not only mothers, but fathers too reported significant feelings of cognitive decline after becoming parents.This suggests that becoming a father can also be emotionally and psychologically overwhelming.

What may be causing a parent to feel “less intelligent”

According to the study’s lead author Sharna Jamadar, parents may be experiencing the changes because they are sleep-deprived and they go through hormone and brain changes. “You’ve got all these new things that you need to learn how to do … and that’s difficult.”Rather than becoming “mentally weaker,” researchers believe parents’ brains may actually be reorganising themselves to help them become more emotionally responsive, alert and adaptive caregivers. In the end, the findings challenge the long-held belief that parenthood makes people mentally weaker. While becoming a parent does reshape the brain, researchers say these changes appear to be more adaptive than harmful, and thus do not affect “intelligence” in particular.