Dr. Darby Saxbe

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745 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Dr. Darby Saxbe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Modern Wisdom · The Painful Psychological Cost Of Becoming A Dad - Darby Saxbe - #1129 · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

Exactly.

Yeah, so I've been looking at new fathers in my lab over the last decade plus.

We've scanned men when they're midway through their partner's pregnancy, and then again after they have their first child.

And we find that the brain, and I should caveat, this is not a bad thing, loses gray matter volume across that transition to fatherhood.

So the patterns look similar to those that have been observed in moms.

And they seem to be of smaller magnitude.

They're more variable and they're more tied to dad's parenting experience.

So new moms lose about 2.5% of their gray matter volume across the transition into first-time motherhood.

And they lose volume in parts of the brain that are really linked to hormones.

So that includes not just the cortex, which if you think about sort of the outer layer of brain tissue that does a lot of our higher order thinking and reasoning, it also includes what's called the subcortex, which contains our amygdala, our ventral striatum, which processes reward.

and a number of other structures that are linked with drive and gut feelings.

Dads change mostly just in the cortex, which is that sort of executive functioning, thinking, and reasoning part of the brain.

Moms show profound changes across the whole brain.

And dad's changes are, like I said, smaller in magnitude.

So dad's is about 1% of their gray matter volume.

And my lab found that this was totally tied to dad's parenting time and investment.

So dads who felt more bonded with their babies before birth, they were more motivated to take time off after birth.

They spent more day-to-day time with kids in the first few months, and they reported feeling more bonded and having more pleasure in interacting with their kids laterally.

Those dads showed the biggest brain change.

There's been a dramatic change.

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