Dr. Darby Saxbe

Yeah, I mean, honestly, that was one of the big reasons I wanted to write this book is because I think we do have these really powerful narratives that women are wired to mother that they're sort of built to instinctively know what to do with a young child.

And dads are just clueless, right?

They're just not sort of equipped in the same way.

And what I wanted to show and what the science is telling us is that we can all adapt to our circumstances and our demands.

And so men are built with the brain architecture that can adapt to parenthood.

And I think of caring and parenting not just as traits that you're born either being good at or not, but as skills that you can hone through time and repetition and practice.

And so women are really socialized to

expect to occupy a primary parenting role.

And we don't necessarily raise our boys with that objective in mind.

But there are men who can become really sensitive and really capable fathers.

there are also men who might be absent from their kids' lives, right?

So there's a big breadth of what fatherhood looks like.

But I think when men choose to invest in care, they have a biology that reflects that.

And so it's not so much that only dads are wired a certain way or only moms are wired a certain way.

We're all wired to be flexible and adaptable.

And that's kind of our human superpower.

Yeah, so I mean, like, if you think about not so much the mothering brain or the fathering brain, but there's this sort of shared parenting brain that helps us think about other people's minds, engage in social cognition, right?

So if you're the parent of a young infant, you, you know, if you think about just in the first few minutes of a baby's cry, you're

you have to be able to orient to distress you have to be able to problem solve to soothe you have to be able to modulate your own irritation or emotion you have to be able to find the interaction rewarding enough to want to repeat it so all of these areas are areas of the brain that change in parenthood right like emotion regulation salience detection reward processing

social cognition.