administration. wrapping up a look at some of the publishers weekly is best-selling nonfiction books is the "washington post" carol leonnig and philip rucker look at the final year of the trump administration in i alone can fix it. some of these authors have appeared on booktv. you can the programs anytime at booktv.org. .. i'd like to welcome you to our author talk. my name is lucy and i'm the adult programs coordinate or here at the library. first it like to thank our sponsor books >> now gives me great pleasure to announce the introduction of abigail tucker, the author of inside the new science of our ancient maternal instinct. she's a journalist, young mother and best-selling author and a graduate of richfield "high school at

harvard college. she works for smithsonian magazine and her new title "mom genes" is about the psychology of motherhood. it's part memoir, "mom genes" lends the latest latest research with abigail's experiences to create an often poignant portrait of motherhood. if everybody could wait and put your presence in the q&a we will go over them at the end.welcome, abby. >> thank you for having g me. thank you to the richfield library and for everybody joining ustonight . i'm a journalist in all kinds of subjects but i'm especially fascinated by the science of domestic life and by what you might call the mystery of the familiar. my first book of a line in the living room was out domestication over 10,000

years and thus changes that ultimately helped uncover the world. my new book is called "mom genes", inside the new science ofour ancient maternal instincts . what do these subjects havein common ?t certain babies share certain physical characteristics that scientists took the time to study. the teachers are called the releasors in the scientific literature thatincludes big eyes, stove nose, round cheeks , accidental striking resemblance to human young is one reason why they were able to take over the world without giving humanity too much in return.vi you could almost say that they so strikingly resemble human babies, pets arepreying on our maternal instincts . the other interesting connection is that they underwent profound but hidden brain changes over those 2000

years as they became domesticated which helps them lose their fear of humans and run roughshod over us at least in certain households. my new book is again about brain change but it is a more rapid brain change that seems to be happening in mothers over 10 months in the course of pregnancy instead of over 10,000 years. the 10 months of pregnancy may feel like 10,000 years to some of us but that's a story for another time. if you take pictures of women's brains before and after pregnancy, they don't look the same. there are changes in gray matter and volume in areas related to social processing and in other spots to. one even found they could identify women who (based on brain scans alone. these changes seem to be permanent. they may also be a relative.

similarly sweeping changes are likely, across mammals of many species from copies to zebras but alongside his universality there are ways in which he each human mother is unique with a note to mom raised exacting exactly alike. this brain change which scientists are still trying to understand is behind the abstract idea of all instinct. it's the desire to respond is a corporal baby drive. there's an awakening, science and an unmasking of a new identity to use the words of one scientist. it's often chemically y incentivized by the hormones pregnancy but it doesn't have to be. it's the most profound change outside of childhood borrowing on traumatic brain injury. our brains during that

maternal period are plastic, changing, moldable as plato. scientists consider motherhood a distinct stageof human development . momsare in flux a little bit like adolescence . growing numbers of labs around the world are interested in this new field of mom science and they use all kinds of high-tech tools that my kids would love to get their hands on. why are moms so interesting for scientists to study? one reason is the anatomy of the maternal great is shared across mammals time so instinct is a common thread in the nurture of all kinds of species. scientists hypothesize that maternal circuitry supplies the raw material for all sorts of fascinating and uniquely human phenomenon like romantic love, religious experience, all tourism, lesbianism, language, music,

compulsive disorder. there are other more practical reasons to figure out what's going on inside a mother. globally 90 percent of women become mothers and even in america 86 percent of us are mothers by the time we reach our mid 40s. 70 percent of moms are in the workforce and their heading up more american households than ever. moms are important political forces as well. but as a mother of four young children myself i'm also interested in the tescientific field for a much more personal andi guess you could say selfish reason . seen from the inside becoming a mother is a very bewildering affair. the physical changes of pregnancy are alarming enough . you might gain 60 pounds technically overnight or suddenly grow straight hair after yours had been curly for 30 years and there is a whole many scientific subfields studying mom odds

and dad bob and their psychological ramifications but we won't go there tonight . yet the interior aspects of the maternal transformation or even more striking and strange and what's going on on her outside. the brain isn't the first ornament comes to mind when you think about childbirth but it's really a very key player. i want to know why do i dream differently than i used two. why did i not find the smell of my daughters diapers disgusting. why did baby cries feel like they're caring my brain apart. arethere moments of this love that i feel . this is as i'm wrapping my mind around the daily one of motherhood i want to confront the downside to . or instance, and i really getting stupider or am i just tired or is something else ng going on entirely . there are also major issues of maternal health to consider which impacts the moms we know.

one striking piece of evidence that a concrete snature of the maternal transformation ishow women's mental health disorders proliferate at the time of birth . postpartum depression reflects something like one in five women and rates are rising yet we still don't know what causes this disease. or how to treat it. obsessive-compulsive disorder impacts more than 10 percent of new mothers and bipolar depression is also more likely to crop up around the birth of our first child so it's not all fun time and baby rattles. people's lives are atstake in understanding the maternal brain . i mentioned that i'm interested in the science of domestic life and in the hidden complexities of what at first seems ordinary when i started reading the mom literature in addition to all the nifty gadgets like microchips you notice many tools used in mom brain experience are actually just jump from around the house.

these researchers use popcorn s kernels and can for cars and address costumes and froot loops cereal marshmallows, family photo albums and gel masks and endless toys and even baby lotion. tonight i'll show you a bit about how science is self and mom had the closets and playrooms to get at the bottom of what's happening in mom ratings. but first, there's one other important mom science tool you shouldknow about it, i hope i don'thave in my house . rodents .actually i do have a hamster but i'm hoping that's all we've got right now. because instinct is ancient concert the crossmember is like lab rats and mice what's going on inside our own cells . for instance i visited robert lab at new york university to

see how his students try to probe the maternal circuitry in my springs. female rats and mice really do not like babies but what they're like his food. all of the junk food in our materials list is actually fact and my streets. these animals love charleston chew bars and froot loops and supersweet stuff like that . babies are not so sweet to them on the other hand . a female mouse will run away from the sound of mouse babies crying and getting ignored is sort of the best case scenario forthese tops. sometimes female rats will attack the babies and even kill them . but just around the time of a pregnant rat gives birth for the first time , a startling kechange takes place inside of her. suddenly she prefers pumps to food.he experiments show a new mother that will test of our

seemingly an infinite number of times to get wrap-ups and just any old baby not just pops from her litter. in an early experiment one mother tested the baby bars and at least 700 times in four hours. and she just didn't stop until the scientist in charge threw up his hands and put the experiment. moms will also choose pumps over cocaine. suddenly don't cross an electric grid to the babies that they onceran away from . this is literally quite shocking to contemplate. but it also sounds fairly familiar to many mothers who have a similar situation in the hospital bed after giving birth. we look for clues about how nd the chemicals of pregnancy, lactation might facilitate this behavioral change and kickoff the process of long-lasting brain for thatwe see in human brains . for instance, students

released oxytocin, the swift hormone associated with labor and delivery and also social bonding into the brains of virgin mice who had gotten pregnant yet. over the course ofthree hours , they were to watch the virgins individual brain cells becoming sensitized, responding more sharply to the sound of christ. through exposure to oxytocin the brains acted more like mother's brains and now if you put these virgins in a cage with babies is likely that they would have run away , they might even perform maternal figures like rescuing the pumps. the story of is also far more complicated than the release of a single coneurotransmitter. in real life, lots of other chemicals beyond oxytocin are also involved estrogen and progesterone and dopamine. they play off each other in ways that scientists arestill

trying to understand . and it's not all chemical climbing either. you canalso reverse engineer a mom without any hormones at all .researchers are also studying how virgin mice can become maternal if you expose them to baby mice in a supervised way for about a week. given enough exposure and once hostile female starts to respond to the pumps and rodent studies suggest her brain is also transforming accordingly getting new factors in key areas and the maternal instinct can be seen as a latent potential or seed and every brain, even male brains that can grow and this might be what happens naturally with adopted mothers. scientists are also pretty sure they found what they

call a central siteof maternal behavior in rats . called the medial coptic area. this part of the brain next to the hypothalamus receives lots of sensory information like places like the ears and nose and it's tethered to reward and motivation hotspots in the brain. this is how we know it's important. new mother rats are so motivated that you can render them unequal to see or hear or taste and they will still continue to care for their pumps but if you disable the pre-optic area of their brain , these behaviors will stop retrieving their pumps and go back to munchingcharleston chew . this deep down symmetry is involved in human moms when we respond to baby coups but lucky for you and me we are

not the same as the giant harry rats. our brains are a lot larger and more complicated with extra layers. to study humans scientists use a different set of tools. they use noninvasive imaging tools like mri to watch how mom's blood is moving around inside their skulls which gives clues to which specific brain parts are in play and there are also electrode cardiogramstudies which measure electrical readings on mom's neurons . and the eeg is not something i have lying around i was able to try one out when i volunteered for some mom experiences in the third trimester of my fourth pregnancy . in fact, that was one of the last things i did in the winter of2020 before the pandemic lockdown began . and even though it's a very different set of stories, the human experiments are actually similar to the rodent ones. what shouldthey do with rats , scientists exposed human women, mothers and

non-mothers sometimes dads to stimuli like baby cries and baby faces and watch what happens next. in one experiment i looked at a bunch of pictures of dad happy and angry babies while pressing a button asfast as i could . the upshot is moms respond differently than other people do including our former selves before we became moms. when we see baby faces or your baby cries are raised respond more sharply and we seem to use what the different parts of the brain as well. we make me stare longer or have slightly different reactionsto emotional signals such as prime faces or streams . we seem to be more responsive to cries of pain . of course, there are some major differences between human moms and wrap moms. to rodent moms as far as we know all babies arecreated equal . but for human moms and some other animals especially for animals like sheep that

raised offspring in chaotic and crowded communities and not in synagogue underground burrows, you're also to be especially responsive to our own babies. we need to be able to tell these two apart so we don't waste our energy on somebody else's kids . and they seem to be becoming sensitized and human motherboards to recognize its own site smell and sound very quickly. this happens almost instantaneously and scientists have a tough time mixing up land lines perfume to trick these mothers once they've gotten their babies memorized. in humans, the learning is a bit slower, maybe taking a day ortwo but it happens . in one fascinating experiment , scientists noted that women in a crowded maternity ward learned with in just 48 hours to wait for the sound of their babies cry only and to sleep through the sound of those other screaming newborns. in the lab brains show

different patterns when we hear our babies voice or rv space. scientists call this maternal awakening, this newfound responsiveness to infant use. inside our brains the chemicals of pregnancy, childbirth are more likely changing the way our genes are expressed, causing the appearance of new services so that zones start to fire and wired retogether. our infant has become the star of our universe, the most fascinating thing in the world. way better than a circus peanuts were a fruit loop. other things going on with human moms as well. scientists noted in late pregnancy and new mother would women like many mammals seem to undergo a deafening deafening stress response. we stay cool and collected during stressful events outside the lab like real life.

after a big one in california scientists contacted their subjects and found that they reported less stress than other people. and in the lab, new moms hormones as other people do if you stick our hands in ice water or show. this likely involve to help moms focus on our babies went under duress and maybe we back in prehistory to allow us to stay hidden from creditors and maybe also to facilitate breast-feeding. a vital process thatinvolves sitting still for many hours on end . critically this dampening of stress and anxiety is coupled with maternal vigilance. in a newfound awareness of our environment including aspects like color, sound and especially strangers faces . anything that might pose a threat. and it's a combination of a

chilled out state of mind and environmental awareness that gives rise to everybody's favorite mom behavior, maternal aggression. moms notice stress and are afraidto face them . a moose mom will attack a bear, a squirrel mom will confront a rattlesnake . in the serengeti i watched a lone lioness face down a pack of hyenas to defend her cub and these predators eventually ran away. although lioness had to dowas give them the stink eye . we've all run afoul of an angry mom at one point or another dairy cows are considered the most dangerous large animals in britain by the way and in large part because mothers attacked and sometimes crushed and killed human walkers, mostly walkers accompanied by dogs. in rats scientists found they can stop ymoms attack behaviors by disabling certain oxytocin receiving areas of the maternal rain and by giving extra oxytocin to human moms.

you can enhance aggressive behavior when moms are confronted with a stranger in the lab to try to touch a baby. another favorite topic is mommy brain. whether moms in the course of undergoing brain transformation get stupider. the shortanswer is not really . wrap moms actually get better certain tasks like finding froot loops in amaze . but what new mothers find worthy of our attention is grandchildren. lost sleep is simplied as new moms give up 700 hours in the first year alone but they just seem to be a mommy to affect in matters of verbal recall. moms are quite as good at remembering words. this may be because the impressive vocabulary isn't as important when you're caring for a three-month-old infant. interestingly these effects seem to be similar to mothers

of three maybe worse verbal recall than first-timers as a mother of four in the middle of writing a book, this was very bad news to see. on the right side the synthesis between mothers of one and experienced mothers of multiple children are among the best evidence that there is a permanent brain change in humans. and indeed with the wrap moms mothers of three do better mazes than first-time moms due to. but i'm also looking at all these common threads that t connect mothers of all species not to mention you and me. it's interesting to consider our differences as well. to me, the striking differences among human moms are just as interesting as their common responses . moms are not robots that are income alone, they are real people with personalities and all that the this factorsinto the mothers that we become .

culture is one huge and obvious aspect of this. the maternal instinct is about the core pro baby motive and drive rather than anyone specific mothering behavior. and we know this because human maternal behavior varies so widely across the globe that there are certain animals like rabbits have to ritualistically make a nest by carrying out the for and if you don't let them do this, they won't be able to care for their babies. meanwhile, of the humans look something a little likea nesting instinct, if you take away my index and still going to carry on and be a mom . there are only a few fixed action human. we use our babies and that's dictated by variables like climate hybrid lies forwhat mothers are doing with their downtime . weise see the babies in

different amounts and in some cultures mother is which is the official term for cute baby talk, doesn't really exist. we breast-feed for different durations or not at all. we sing or don't sing. we make eye contact or don't. but once the things moms have to universal mothering behavior is less vital. our unconscious tendency to hold babies on the left especially in their first few months of life. this is actually common across example of type. when mothers balancing with a baby on the left. in one study russian scientists stturned their babies bobbing in the water off a remote island in siberia and counted the babies stayed on the mom's lap. they counted foxes hanging out in tree branches in sri

lanka. this left-handed bias has to do with collateralized mammal brain and how we perceive our babies emotions. in humans holding on the left may better transmit information to their right side of a moms spraying . for where emotional information is processed. it also lets infants read the more expressive left side of their mother spaces. i think it's literally impossible to hold the baby on my right side or to change are on the right. my husband and i have countless discussions about why this might be before i learned about the left side cradling bias. and while women can hold their babies however they want scientists are exploring a preliminary link to holding and depression in mothers. one way they studied this despite reaching for a moms family photos, reading moms closets once again. but behind these primitive

behaviors moms are different within the same culture. rinew moms can have pretty different brains. we've scanned women's brains before and after pregnancy scientists found that not all women changed to the same degree. they did find a larger degree of gray matter predicted a stronger degree of maternal attachment to the baby after birth . in short they use the moms brain scan to forecast aspects of hermaternal behavior . i find this fascinating and troubling. i becameinterested in some of the variables that influence why you are the type of mother you are and why i am the type of mother i am . i'm stressed that women from all kinds of backgrounds and situations can be amazing parents that these are just interesting factors to consider. one study that caught my eye early on was genetics studies . these tests for women born of certain genetic variants for

oxytocin receptors for instance turned out to be measurably more expensive as mothers so i went to a lab in north carolina with scientists of mothers and children interacting in his face that felt like a fake living room.these all sorts of other analytical tools taking into account mothers socioeconomic backgrounds and other personal variables . genetic analysis is just one form of the approach in the space researchers used second by second video coding to scrutinize moms interactions in a very finely grained and a specific way. some weirdly familiar household materials come into play in these type of experiments. while mothering and totter toddler interacting in a lab researcher plays dress-up putting on a friendly older costume and entering the room with to surprise the mother and child. but sometimes the researchers send in a remote control car disguised as a giant spider.

that then we sit back and watch how the mother and child react to this line. these experiments are designed to run the kids but not the mom so she can help " . some moms ignore the kids, others overreact. and there's everything in between. trained coders are exploring the moms every move, operating her sensitivity. then the lab collects the le sample from each mom and uses simple genetic analysis to see if having one genotype or another producer behavior. later in these experiments i suddenly got worried i would have to get my own genes tested to see if i had the sensitive money or insensitive money jean to grossly oversimplified these methods. but it turns out this was still in its infancy and researchers had only found very weak relationships

between specific gene variants and real-world maternal behavior.that's not to say that genes are involved and important. in fact farmers and livestock scientists are at work now trying to breed supermom chicks and cows as alarming as that sounds. but for animals and humans it's not as simple as a good mom jean . and dna in general is only one really understood component ndof the variance the variations that we've seen in maternal behavior. a human moms environment is much more established and easy to study motive influence. there's only time to explore a few of these tonight. i'm just going to list the few circumstantial factors minor and major that seem to influence maternal behaviors to various degrees . so did a mom babysit as a kid, how old is she.

did she bottle or recipe,did she have a c-section or a natural birth. was it an unusually painful delivery, did she have a boy or girl how much money is in her bank account . what's her lifelong exposure to plastic and other chemicals . as you work swing shifts, is she single, does her diet include a lot of fish . keeping a fish in the diet there's another study of animals interfere when we start to get into the importance of moms broader social world. that's killer whales which are another one of those animals that have an active and involved grandmas. human grandmothers are very important part of human moms stories . so whether or not your mom babysit your kids there's some evidence she's battling in your parenting anyway. a mothers relationship with her own mom can shape her behavior in certain ways. it turns out women who have good relationships with their moms they have more gray matter in certain areas of their brain. these women also seem to respond more sharply to

pictures of their own kids during lab tests. is this because maternal behavior runs in families? scientists have done longitudinal studies over 30 years following the same families around more than a generation as subjects who started out as young kids grow up and become moms. they oftenasked act like their own momused to. what's behind these patterns . it's obviously some genetic component . but scientists have also explored other very interestingalternative explanations . using lab animals like lab rats and monkeys, they switched around him another babies hair so the animals mothers raise foster babies aren't related to them. it turns out that the young girl up to act like their adopted mother's not the biological mothers. it is here that the relationship is at least in part transmitted through experience rather than inherent. it's possible that physical interaction may lead to the enhanced expression of

certain genes that in turn lead to sensitivity to hormones and brain growth. or those same genes may be silenced . by an animal early life experiences. so to an extent is not the genes that you have that matter. it's how they get turned on or off by the nurturing you nreceive. on the opposite end of the spectrum, moms are also shaped by their children. but simply differences in children may account for differences in mothers c. i know that my four kids would have reacted very differently to that older experiment we described earlier which in turn would affect my behavior. moms are silly putty to a certainextent . this seems to be true even before birth. for a long time researchers thought that pregnant women's level of arousal shape the level of arousal but if mom gets startled the babywill

sense that and startle inside her . but then scientists at johns hopkins university noticed a pattern ran the other way to with the fetus is stimulating the mother. to test this the scientists use some of our otherfavorite household material, popcorn kernels and gel masks . they put noise canceling headphones on the credit women so they couldn't hear or see. the scientists then snuck up on the women with two full of popcorn kernels which they rattled really loudly about theirpregnant bellies . only the fetus could hear this and its response triggered our response in the mother's changing our heart rates. of course, some fetuses just like kids are more sensitive and reactive than others . doctors are investigating how the unborn may already be testing their mothers to prepare for an active child.

in many other aspects of the child that take the mother including child books , the power of those babyreleasers i mentioned earlier which more or less constitute what we call to this . and in intelligence and other factors. for example, moms think slightly more energy rich breast milk for boys as opposed to girls one study found. this sex-based nonproduction seems common across mammals. note house for instance seem to make a greater volume of four daughters which is something that very farmers probably like. but also keyis a larger environment where mother and baby find themselves . are a mothers social network and exposure to stress are vitally important. to study these influences scientists often use monkeys. which have complex social relationships more like ours. monkey work is where the marshmallowscome in.

marshmallows are a favorite monkey food as well as a favorite kid food i found . and the california and the national primate research center with its huge acts among monkeys and it was a little eerie because the monkeys equipment is exactly like the kind of hollow plastic flight that you see it every day care and playground . monkeys also get pumpkins at halloween trust just like our families do . scientists go to watch these monkey moms multiple times per week keeping their behavior. they buy now identified certain factors shaping how a given mother acts. what is your proximity to her own mother ? grandmothers don't go through menopause. the monkeys maintain close and cordial relationships with their own moms and draw lots of support and having her in the same enclosure. and let me point out in humans the importance of the maternal grandmother but just be a global concept that rivals left-sided anxiety.

maternal grandmother's take their daughters physical health seriously, and above all offering social support which can guard against many kinds of maternal health problems including postpartum depression. another monkey mom variable is the uv office. these factors may make her more confident or anxious in handling her baby and change the stress chemicals in her blood humans hierarchical differences like income equality are sometimes associated with postpartum depression . resources like food is another big difference. another monkey lab in new york state scientists use a device called a variable fortune card to test how access to resources shapes maternal behavior . this meals contraction looks

a little bit like a average service card on an airplane but it has a bunch of holes on the side for monkeys to reach their hands in and feel for food amongst woodchips. this piece of highly specialized equipment did look like it might be handy to have around my house for parceling out goldfish crackers among the kids. anyway, in the science experiment sometimes the monkeys found a card and sometimes it's harder to find all the moms in these experiments ultimately get enough food to eat and the ones with the hard-to-find food are attentive mothers just like the ones with the easy to find food but some of the moms don't know w week to week whether they will get a hard or in easy tpart and among these moms, the ones who experience llchronically on certain conditions and never know what kind of food they're going to begetting from week to week , attentive internal behavior and to disintegrate and their babies

even sustain physiological damage. for human moms two, research and certainty is very dangerous and economics can have impacts on maternal mental health and behavior. i saw this freakonomics, events like economic downturns can lead to miscarriage, overpraised , even unexpected increases in sin is death. adverse conditions like stress and poverty and even simple things like diaper shortages can be triggered by postmortem depression. some scientists think postpartum depression is adaptive. a way of distancing a mom from her baby so she can move on emotionally and survive until conditions improve and she can pass on her jeans to another baby. it's all scary to contemplate but the good news is as humans we have a lot of collective control over our environment. we can make the world better

for mothers, and scientists are developing new postpartum depression medications and as in the lower columbia where they study postpartum and pericardium therapies. that's how i ended up getting to listen to a meditation tape and a baby lotion massage all in the name of science. it pregnant women out there, maybe you can volunteer for an experiment like this one. some moms have even showed preliminary evidence that cold-like prosperity can change how mothers act in response to baby food.ybut really the best thing to do is to enhance the maternal, the national environment for mothers before trouble hits. by increasing their feelings of economic and social stability. sounds hard, it is. but for differences in support from others are likely one reason why postpartum depression rates seem to vary by country. the truth is we've already

received maternal behavior in profound ways. to improve health and sanitation policies drastically cut down infant deaths in the last century, we fostered the hyper investment parenting strategy we see on the playground today and a pandemic to weave also see how maternal behavior responds to larger cues express and isolation, especially isolation from those aforementioned grandma's and how dangerous that kind of loneliness can be foryoung mothers . we can continue to make the world easier with eahealthcare policy and other countries offer nursing services that continue for weeks and sometimes for years afterthey leave the hospital . one study found maternity leave correlated with a substantial drop in anti-anxiety medications that new mothers needed possibly because the mother felt better supported.

above all we could use a measurable reality of the maternal instinct as an excuse to leave new mothers high and dry and to falsely assume that mother nature will take care of everything and that moms are going to soldier on against all kinds of odds. the maternal instinct is quite real but it is plastic and like a lot of the plastic stuff we have lyingaround their houses , it can then bend and eventually break. thank you. thank you abby, that was interesting. now, i don't know if everyone heard me say that if you have questions, you should type them in the q&a. so please, ask any questions you have or comments. no open questions.

how hard was it to write this ? our whole family. you know, i have had the good fortune of living in connecticut here at yale university where which was a half for a lot ofthese kinds of experiments . the study center is sort of the global authority on this kind of work and authat made it possible for me to meet up with some of these moms who were going into the lab and watch them, to learnof these tools which would have been hard to do from a distance . another thing is these moms in richfield are curious about this, i'm sure that with covid restrictions lifting, gail will be looking for moms to go into the lab

to do some of these fascinating things which is one of the best things we can do as moms and humans because these experiments are hard to recruit for and they are really safe and super interesting but you just have to make the effort . class let's see what's in the q&a. a comment. this is fascinating and so affirming.i found it all to be super interesting and it struck me that i really had never considered. i was a science writer with 2 children when i first heard about the fact that there was developmental change involved with motherhood and i really was s kind of and the more i learn the more interesting it got. i continued fascinating things as new papers come out

and do things that i really that moms should be told even in their ob visit about how having a male pregnancy is slightly different for your body and brain and having a girl. i just didn't know these things. i didn't realize that having boys with a lot of, it brings with it a lot of extra health risks and even mental health risks. there's a rise in women who are pregnant with boys are slightly more likely to have postpartum depression. and there's even more fascinating research about how the environment that we're talking about like the huge importance of the world in which the mother finds herself can sort of load the dice to whether or not you have a boy or a girl the first place, we're used to thinking that it's kind of a 50-50 proposition or roll of the dice but there's very well established evidence that shows that women who are

really stressed out for sort of go through stressful is's are more likely to have girls. for example after 9/11, not just in the greater new york area but nationally there was a dip in the number of expected male births, nine months after 9/11. that's actually a very common expense. again, that's just chilling out mom is making another play. more questions here, let me see. how much do fathers bring to change during pregnancyafter the birth of their child . that's a good question . so in the study that i was talking about where they measured pregnant women raise before they became pregnant and after birth and so two

years after that they were able to develop an algorithm. but moms based on brain scans alone. and algorithm was not able to spot death. so the change is not exactly the same. and it's a more variable. so basically, go all the way from not chasing anything at all if they are having no contact with the mother of their child and the baby. they don'tchange in the same way that mom will . all the way to the other end of the spectrum where there have been studies on to bother households where nthat show that dad's brains construct to resemble mothers brains if they are given this primary responsibility of infants and there's that reverse engineering that goes on even though this guy didn't necessarily decide who intends exposure to the child

that maternal see the down in the rain starts to grow. and i think a lot of the differences that we perceive between the way moms and dads do things have to do with the amount of exposure that dads do have to the babies and just because of cultural reasons , there's a lot of disparities there. but even that said, there are differences that i don't think that experience can account for like there's this fascinating field of research on microtiter resume which is when the fetuses cells cross the placenta during pregnancy into the mother's body and instead in her tissue coming part of her tissue or her liver tissue there's a lot of debate about what these cells are doing in your body for the rest of your life but they found that the cells can also make it all the way across the barrier of the brain and become neurons.

so in moms goals we have the cells of our children, even all four children that are out there and that's not something that dads have.so the experiments i think can be deeply profound but they're not identical experiences. i remember hearing how anderson cooper was so upset that his little baby son darted to walk and he didn't see it. that's a fail. the conclusion that mothers need social support structures to thrive, are you aware of any public policy measures coming out of the studies that found that would improve outcomes for moms in the us? it does seem obvious and what's shocking to me is to learn the amount of social support. i knew that europe had better

social support but i didn't realize is that you have a baby in some of these european countries they will do things like send a baby nurse home with you from the hospital four weeks to help you take care of the new baby and your other children and to run errands and all kinds of stuff. and in australia they have nurses that will keep tabs on new moms for years. and so in america is like you kind of get this one measly postpartum visit and then you sort of drop off the face of europe and then it sort of becomes a very pediatrician centric kind of thing. so there's really big emphasis on measures like that but there's a really fascinating study done at yale that shows that the number one environmental factor that correlated with depression in new mothers was lack of access to disposable

diapers. and so it wasn't like food insecurity or relationships stress, it was very simple tthings that these women work stressed out because they didn't know where their next diapers were coming from and there are also the barriers to getting diapers . if your with somebody living in poverty and to me, that is a measure that is crying out for some kind of publicaction . it's treating postpartum depression maternal substance abuse, all these things are devastating and incredibly expensive. and if we can use this research to head some of these problems off and connect them in thebud , that's not only is it sort of the right thing to do but it'salso the economical thing to do . completely. next question. i'm and i but have no children of myown. i found this interesting .

off-topic, what year did you graduate. i was glad to hear you say that some things can be triggered in adoptive moms. i'm a class of 98. a long time ago graduate and i think that their research on how mammals who have not physically gestated a child can manifest change and develop a maternal capacity. if some of this is inspiring research that came across that there's actually a brain growth that goes on in these lab rats and in human moms obviously we don't play dress-up for play adoptive moms but they found that given enough time, foster moms and adopted moms start to physiologically respond to their babies much like

biological moms do. that is sort of a fascinating thing and the other thing that i kind of love with this idea that importance of nurturing in early infancy. so the idea that any child that you take care of or just have a relationship with her or not they're related to you by blood, you are molding that child as a future mother and you're even arguably molding generations of mothers just by having had that one carrying relationship so i think that the science of adoptive mom is one of the coolest things. class some of the connections between socioeconomic status, food access etc. and postpartum anxietydisorder make a lot of sense.were there any findings that surprised you ? i was surprised that there is a public health scholar out in california who studies the relationship between economic

downturns and sudden infant death syndrome.and i was really shocked bythat . i can't remember exactly the statistic, it's something like a small drop in the city's economy correlated with like a five or eight percent uptick in babies that suddenly died. and i was shocked by that and i was also shocked by things about how a military base announcing a closing would suddenly leave to an uptick in premature birth and in that area. i did, i guess i wasn't quite as aware of how tuned into the environment moms really are and how we're constantly absorbing and responding to these cues in ways that t are not always to us on the

outside, they're not always happy storiesbasically . another comment, behavioral psychology thwith the studies using mice have noted these maternal tendencies when this person studied psychology in the1950s . you discuss all the losses that new moms experienced, should this beseriously studied ? oh yes. i think it's definitely should be studied and i don't think it can beunderestimated . when we're talking about these, it's a very hot topic. this idea of new moms lose cognitive capacity when they have children and it's a very dangerous topic in a way. i i should hear point out i'm not sure if i specifically said this in the car but one of the cool things about

writing about this is that so many of their researchers on the cutting edge of this work are young mothers, even women and their meeting these humongous strides and in science and publishing all the time. working around the clock and they're certainly not losing their marbles. or the ability to string two words together. but that said, this idea of whether or not there is a cognitive deficit occurs particularly in the areas related to memory and especially verbal recall. it's something that scientists go back and forth about a lot still . and you know, the studies contradict each other but somebody did a study of i think it was a meta-analysis of studies where they tried to crunch all the numbers and saw there was a trend and the trend is saying yes, moms are losing some verbal recall and

whether the cause is sleep or whether it's this contraction of gray matter that they see on the brain scans, i'm not sure if we know exactly yet why but i basically it's definitely something that is begging for more research and also an important data point and why moms need social support so much because really when you're falling down with exhaustion, it's easy to get upgraded and to put yourself too far and if somebody else oosteps in and helps you, you can save your research to discuss it that only you can really do. class agreed. let's see. let's see if there's anything more in the q&a. what are some of your favorite parenting motherhood books you've read being in your parenting journey. class so on the light side, i

love i say my favorite ones are bringing up baby and battle hymn of the tiger mother. those are the humorous memoirs i talk a lot to, the idea of culture in parenting is something that i was very interested in and i know that drucker, the author of bringing up baby points out that in france , the parenting advice of i believe this is still taken seriously and she also points out that all those children ended up in orphanages. so i found that to be a kind of fascinating point that there's certain year we have doctor spock or today emily oster who i know and like very much but in france, their reading these other texts with not just parenting

philosophies but all also aspects of national policy. i love those two books. there's other books that tend to map you out of the american parenting mode and make you think about what it would be like to parents just in a place that is familiar to us like modern france but in a place where really resources are scarce and where mothers are constantly faced with the unthinkable and hellish abus situations. there's a book called death without weeping which is about life but also a lot about amothering in very poor parts of brazil and it's just kind of stunning to imagine the things that people endure routinely and that somehow are built to endure but that don't seem to compute in our

modern privileged mom mind. here's a nice comment. these are important studies. the research is fascinating andhopefully it will continue to be financially supported . does anyone have any more questions or comments? no, okay then. thank you. abigail tucker, thanks everyone for coming and thank you very much two books on the common for cosponsoring this program. our next program will be august 11. it's an author talk with melissa shapiro about a small pink dog named piglet who had a quarter of 1 million instagram followers. i wish i had a copy of the book.

i do not because i just started at this library and the book is out . but of course it's out. you can purchase abigail's book "mom genes" from books on the common. iq so much abigail. that was really interesting and thank you for coming tonight 's good night. ..

>> book tv continues now. television for serious readers. >> first of all, i'm delighted as always to say thanks to the national archive staff and the acknowledgments, the recognition of the staff of national archives chicago is much appreciated. anthony comstock devoted his career to opposing what he deemed immoral. the comstock act outlawed sending obscenity and contraceptives through the u.s. mail and its effect lasted for 100 years. after the passage, eight remarkable women engaged in a decades long fight against comstock's law in court and the press. amy sung brings to