How Parenting Is Hard-Wired

[Posty]

Parenting changes everything. There’s no getting around it. Becoming a mother or father is hard and demanding, And when you become a parent for the first time, your life alters dramatically. Yet for the most part, we take to the job naturally and immediately when babies arrive. And it’s not just us. Mammals of all sorts, from mice to monkeys, must do the same because mammalian babies are born particularly vulnerable. That suggests that parenting behavior is hard-wired.

Neuroscientists have long wondered how the brain manages such a complex and important feat. They’ve known for decades some of the brain areas involved, but they didn’t know much about how they were connected--how they worked together in other words. Now, a report (link is external) just published in Nature (link is external) gives us the first ever look at the inner workings of a brain-wide circuit orchestrating parenting behavior.

The circuit that’s been identified is in mice, but there’s reason to think it might be similar in humans. In this circuit, a relatively small set of neurons coordinate all the necessary behaviors, sending signals to subsets of neurons, which handle the specifics. For instance, in mice, grooming pups is very important. The new paper identifies a subset of neurons that trigger that grooming behavior. The whole system works like a mayor’s office managing a large city, with a staff of several hundred running different departments that serve a population of millions.

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[Andrada]

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