The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
The Neuroplasticity of Parenthood #68
This episode is a quiet, reflective departure from Jon’s usual teaching format—part science, part story, part meditation on what parenting does to the human brain. Beginning with the migration of the Arctic tern, Jon explores how love quite literally rewires us, asking what happens when the self itself begins to migrate in service of another.
Parents will walk away with a deeper understanding of neuroplasticity, caregiving, and identity—and a tender reassurance that feeling disoriented, changed, or unlike your former self isn’t a failure of parenting, but evidence that love is doing its work.
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Every year, somewhere above the raging Atlantic Ocean, a small white bird begins one of the longest migrations on Earth. The Arctic Turn. It weighs about four ounces, roughly the size of a deck of cards, and yet it travels from the top of the world to the bottom again. From Greenland to Antarctica, tracing a 25,000 mile circuit of sky and sea. No GPS, no flock leader, just instinct, light, and memory. Scientists have tried for decades to understand how a brain the size of a walnut can carry such precision. How does it remember the way? It turns out it doesn't. At least not in the way that we think of memory. When researchers studied the tern and other long-distance migrators, starlings, sparrows, swallows, they discovered something remarkable. The part of the bird's brain responsible for navigation, the hippocampus, actually changes with the seasons. In the months before migration, new neurons grow, increasing the birds' spatial awareness and memory capacity. When the journey ends, those neurons die back. They're pruned. Their brain expands and contracts in the rhythm with the cycles of travel. In other words, the tern's brain reshapes itself to meet the demands of love and survival, to find its way home. That idea has stayed with me, because maybe we're not so different. For example, we have studies that show that the hippocampal regions of New York City taxi drivers are larger than normal to compensate for their need to orient themselves in the sprawling metropolis of the five boroughs. And Tibetan monks have 50% more gray matter density in their brain due to their habitual meditation practices. But what about for the rest of us? What about the normal parents living normal lives? Are there seasons of our lives that demand the same kind of transformation as the turn? When our family's mental maps no longer work? When we have to grow new neurons, new instincts, just to find our way through love or loss, or change? What happens inside the human brain when life asks itself to reorient entirely around another human being? When survival stops being a solo act. When the self itself begins to migrate. This is the whole parent podcast. When I became a parent, people warned me about the sleep deprivation and diapers and the never fish finishing a cup of coffee, at least while hot again. No one told me that my brain would actually change shape. Literally. Neuroscientists at the University of Denver studying the brains of new parents, especially postpartum mothers, but even fathers and non-biological adoptive parents. They found something incredible. Growth. Not only in the limbic system that handles emotions and memory, but also in the neocortex, especially the prefrontal cortex. Regions of empathy, vigilance, and planning. They've also found pruning, just like the turn, the brain shrinking in the neural synapses tied to self-focus. Becoming a parent, as it turns out, is not only about gaining something, it's about losing something to you. The story we tell is that parenting makes you tired or older, perhaps in my case, balder and softer around the middle. But maybe the real transformation is not external at all. It's internal. A kind of neurobiological alchemy that rewires the maps of ourself. And once you see that, it changes everything you think you know about love, attention, and even identity. In 2014, a neuroscientist named Ruth Feldman scanned the brains of mothers and fathers watching their children. What she found startled her. We have long known that mothers' brains change during pregnancy, but many of those same neural networks, oxytocin pathways, empathy circuits, emotional regulation centers, lit up not only in women, but also in men. It didn't seem to matter who gave birth. What matters is who bonded. Caregiving, Feldman realized, was not just an instinct, it's a skill to be learned. A learned neurochoreography, written through repetition, eye contact, touch. The brain was teaching itself to love. But this isn't just about science. It's about what it means to be human in a world that keeps pretending that we're finished products. We often say that people don't change. Personality is fixed. We even have a phrase for it. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. But parenthood violates that cultural assumption. It's the one experience that proves that even after decades of living, the brain is still like wet clay. And not just for parents. Because caregiving, whether for a child, a partner, or an aging parent, is the same neural act to reshape the boundaries of self around another. Which also raises the question: if love changes the brain so profoundly, then what is left of the person that we were before? I remember early in Whole Parent going on this podcast. The podcast host was consumed with this concept of matrescence, a word identifying the stage of a life associated with becoming a mother. It's like adolescence is for kids becoming an adult, matrescence is becoming a mother. She was early in her parenting journey, or I guess earlier than I am now. Her kids were four and two, and we were talking about parenting, and specifically she was asking me as a parent of, I think at that point, like a seven-year-old, when am I gonna start to feel like myself again? Is it when my kids go off to school? I gave her the hard truth. Never. At least not exactly the same. That person's dead. You're a new person now. And if you keep waiting for her to resurrect, she's just gonna continue to decay and stink up your house, ruining the life that you have now. Honor her, by all means mourn her, and then bury her in the backyard, and embrace the new wonderful you that you are becoming. One night when I was rocking my oldest back to sleep, and the room was dark except for this thin bar of light from the hallway, I remember the sound. The soft hum of the sound machine, the tiny sighs against my chest. I was half asleep when it hit me. I wasn't actually thinking about me at all. For perhaps the first time in my life, the entire machinery of my brain, every neuron, every muscle, every bit of my attention was oriented outward, toward him, someone else. It wasn't a sacrifice. It was a relief. The world felt quieter there in the middle of the night silence. My ambitions, my worries, they all receded, like a tide pulling back from the shore. Last night I felt that again as I rocked my daughter this time. She just turned a year old, she has a bad cold, it's been keeping her up most of the past three nights. These are the contradictions of caregiving. It erases you if you let it, but not in a bad way, in an exquisite way. The science calls it decreased activity in the default mode network. It's the system that lights up when we daydream or focus on ourselves. But the language of science feels too small for what actually is happening here. Because beneath this is something ancient. Can I say it's something holy? The self dissolves, and in its place, there grows something much faster, a new capacity, a new world. Neuroplasticity is a big word for a small miracle. It's what we're talking about today for the most part. It's our ability for our brain to change itself through experience. I remember when my grandmother was 91 years old, she started learning Spanish. Why, I have no idea. It was just something to do. But she was told by her doctor that she actually could learn Spanish still, that her brain wasn't fixed. As they said about the old dog's myth, most of us think that brain development is exclusively for the young. But my grandmother changed that, in my opinion, at least for me. I stopped believing that our wiring hardens and calcifies with age. This is bared out in studies of parents. They prove otherwise. We aren't set in our ways. Each moment of soothing, anticipating, protecting reshapes the neural scaffolding of our mind. Our amygdala becomes more sensitive to another's distress, our prefrontal cortex grows better at predicting someone else's needs. Even the reward circuits adapt, making love itself addictive in the best possible way. And yet, let's be face it, it's not all tenderness. That same rewiring that expands our empathy also amplifies our fear. The vigilance that keeps your child safe can morph into crippling anxiety. You wake up in the middle of the night, not because something is wrong, but because your brain is too alert to the possibility that something could be wrong. I don't remember where I heard it, but someone once said having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body. We can't always protect them, and that really scares us. The big emotions like love and fear, they get woven together in the same neural fabric. That's the biological cost that we face for connection. We think of independence as this evidence of strength in our culture, in the world. But maybe true strength is actually our willingness to be rewired by love without totally losing ourselves in the process. To let our mind become porous enough to encompass another's existence. There's something haunting about that, because our culture really doesn't have a category for it. We like to praise resilience and autonomy and especially productivity, but we rarely praise surrender. But parenting, caregiving in all its forms, it's a slow apprenticeship in surrender. It's not about efficiency or mastery. It's about a steady erosion of one's ego, the neural education in humanity and humility. Which might be why parents like that mom that I talked to, parents like me, maybe like you, we feel disoriented. We live in a world that's built for individuals. There's self-branding, self-optimization, endless books about self-improvement, while our brains are constantly being reprogrammed for something better, something deeper. Not codependence, not independence, but interdependence. We're trying to quantify and commodify love in units of attachment. But caregiving has never worked that way. It's inherently non-transactional. Instead, it's transformational. The more you give, the more your brain reshapes to give itself again. And that reshaping doesn't vanish when our children grow up, when they leave the nest, when they go to college or set out on their own and get their first apartment. Studies show that those same empathy circuits remain active for decades, even longer if we keep feeding them. The paths that we forge, that we walk every day of parenthood, they don't evaporate overnight. That little bird that traces the invisible lines between the poles, its brain shrinking and expanding with the rhythms of migration. I've actually been thinking a lot about migration lately. My kids and I just watched a movie featuring migration. It's called The Wild Robot. It's a movie about a robot, as you would expect, wired to serve humanity. But it crash lands in this forest, untouched by human hands, entirely populated by woodland creatures. I only just saw it for the first time last week, and it's already one of my favorite animated movies ever. Maybe that's recency bias. I don't think so. Through a series of unfortunate events, the robot, named Roz, comes to care for a hatchling goose. He's the runt of his flock. His love for her, like the love that we have for our children, is instant. The moment he first opens his little eyes, he imprints on the strange metal foreigner, and that most of the creatures believe to be a vicious monster. What follows is a coming of age story of sorts. Ra' spends the majority of the movie preparing this little gossling to leave, to migrate, just like the turn. The movie is measured in change. Change in the gosling, learning to be a goose. Change in Raz's sidekick, a fox, who's in the process of learning empathy. And change in Roz, once driven by programming, who eventually develops the capacity to love. What was once considered impossible through the magic of imagination and, well, animation, is made possible. The immutable programming of a robot changes. Maybe we're not so different than Roz or her gossling, or for that matter, the turn. Parenthood, or any deep form of care, is its own kind of migration of impossible growth. From the self that we once were to the one that we never expected to become. From autonomy to attachment. From survival to surrender. And maybe that's the great hidden truth in the human brain. That we're built not just to think or to reason, but to transform. To let love carve new impossible pathways through us, over and over until what remains is not the person that we planned to be, maybe even not the person that we wanted to be, but the one that love has patiently rewoven. The turn flies back and forth each year, guided by the map that lives inside of its body. And so do we. A map not written in ink or memory, but living tissue. The infinitely complex neural web of neurons and synapses, and the beautiful miracle of plasticity. And somewhere in that map, in all of the rewired circuits of love and loss and sleepless nights, we find the most human truth of all. That to love is to lose yourself. And in losing yourself, to finally find your place in the great web of life. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom. And like I said in the mid-roll, you can subscribe on Substack. It's$5 a month or$50 a year. Uh I don't have that many people doing it, and yet the people who are doing it have made this possible. And so if you like this episode, if you like all of the episodes, if you want them to continue, the only way that I can keep making them is through donor support, free will donations to the podcast. Please, please, please, please, as you're thinking about the end of this year, as you're thinking about your charitable giving. I know I'm not a 501c3. You can't write it off on your taxes, but if you'd like to give me a little gift to just say thank you for what you've done this year, the best way to do that is over on Substack. Again,$5 a month,$50 a year. It's not going to break the bank. It's probably less than you spend on coffee every week. Definitely less than you spend on coffee every week. Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast and sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.
