Inside Neuroscience: Midwives and Parenthood
Raising children is one of the most profound life events in the human lifespan, bringing change to parents’ bodies, behaviors, and desires. In humans and animal models, neuroscientists are beginning to explore the neurological underpinnings of these changes, and how they affect our capacity for care.
Bianca Jones Marlin
“Care is one of the most influential social interactions,” said Bianca Jones Marlin, who studies the neuroscience of parenting at Columbia University. “Every person has a parent, and every person has had interactions for care… there are vast consequences to both physical and mental health when these interactions go awry.”
While the human parenting experience might seem unique, many species provide care to their offspring to improve their survival. “It’s not just the females in a species that care for offspring,” Marlin noted. Among rodents, males and “aunties” also care for pups and assist mother animals.
In a Neuroscience 2025 press conference titled “The Parenting Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Nurture,” moderated by Marlin, researchers offered insights into the neurological underpinnings of this behavior, hinting at ways to understand our own experiences with care.
Pregnancy: A Developmental Window for Mothers
During pregnancy and the initial post-partum period, mothers face tremendous physical and mental changes, supporting not only the growth and birth of a child, but bonding and care of the child after birth.
“Motherhood is one of the most universally studied human experiences… but we, as neuroscientists, are only catching up,” said Camila Servin Barthet, who studies brain changes in pregnant women at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Camila Servin Barthet
In her research, Servin Barthet used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to visualize the brains of women experiencing their first pregnancy, tracking changes in brain structure from before pregnancy through six months post-partum. The results suggested that a stunning 94% of the brain’s structure changed during that time.
Specifically, mothers experienced widespread, drastic reductions in gray matter volume — what Servin Barthet termed the “neighborhoods” of the brain — peaking at 34 weeks pregnancy, followed by partial recovery of this volume six months later. Changes to the white matter, or “highways” of the brain, were more localized, affecting regions involved in vision and emotional processing.
“The transition to motherhood is a unique window for brain plasticity… in adult life,” said Servin Barthet. Some of these changes, she believes, may help women bond with their child.
Fatherhood and Care
Yongxiang Li
While fathers don’t experience the same extensive changes in brain and body that come with pregnancy, the birth of a child is a profound experience for fathers as well, affecting their behavior. Inspired by his own experience as a new father, Yongxiang Li is using a mouse model to study the neuroscience of fatherhood at the University of South Florida.
“Fatherhood behavior is important for offspring survival and social development,” said Li. “The key question is: How does the male brain adapt or change during the fatherhood transition?”
Virgin male mice, Li found, may sniff and explore newborn mouse pups, but will generally leave them where they lie, returning to their own nest without the pups. But as soon as those neglectful male mice become fathers, they will reliably collect pups and bring them back to the nest, even if the pups are not their own. The father mouse “gets the pup, then… goes back for the next. It is very fast,” Li said.
Curious about the molecular basis for this change in behavior, Li identified a specific class of neurons that display the transient receptor potential channel 5, or Trpc5; upon the transition to fatherhood, these neurons ramp up the amount of Trpc5. Mice lacking Trpc5 in these neurons seldom display “fatherly” behaviors.
Li hopes that his discovery of a molecular pathway in the development of fatherly behaviors may lead to a way to make the human fatherhood transition easier.
Mice as Midwives
While many of the behaviors displayed by animals — such as the pup retrieval in Li’s study — are instinctual, others may be learned, requiring social interaction from experienced parents.
“Mice act like midwives and can help each other give birth, and this improves maternal-infant survival,” said Robert Froemke, whose lab at New York University studies parenting and caregiving behaviors in mice.
Robert Froemke
Using a documentary filmmaking system, equipped with infrared cameras and monitoring mouse families from all angles 24/7, Froemke has discovered a key role for learning in motherhood among mouse families.
Housed alone, he found that while many mouse moms managed to give birth and care for their pups instinctually, about a third of mouse moms regularly lost all their pups, litter after litter. But given the company of a mouse mom who has successfully birthed and cared for pups, essentially a midwife, mouse moms who previously lost their pups learned to care for their offspring and could even pass their knowledge on to the next mom in need.
For pregnant mice lacking the hormone oxytocin, who generally die along with their pups while giving birth, experienced mouse moms help in the birthing process, increasing the survival rates of both new mom and pups.
“We found that mice co-parents interact in a lot of interesting ways to help each other, even including with delivery,” said Froemke.
Froemke’s studies of mouse family life offer a window into the complex social interactions that support caregiving across the animal world. “Having children and raising children are some of the most challenging things that we and other animals have to do,” he said.
“Without a doubt, we're humans, and we're interested in humans, and so studying the human experience is absolutely critical. But there are some things that we can do in non-human species that I think remain really important,” said Froemke. “We still have more work to do to make sure all moms and babies make it.”
