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

And I should preface by saying the research literature is really scant.

Part of why I wrote the book is because I want more studies to get funded and more studies to get done in both dads and moms.

So there's one study that I know of that looks at what happens to the brain when you have a second kid.

It was done in moms.

It was done in the Netherlands.

And what happens is the brain shrinks again, but it actually shrinks in some different ways and in some different places.

So there's some rebound.

So we actually think maternal brain change, and I'm guessing paternal brain change too when we have more moms,

longitudinal data points is actually u-shaped so you lose volume and then you regain some volume which is adaptive exactly because you don't necessarily want to end up with a much smaller brain after having had many more kids so you get some rebound but then 10 kids and you can't function the kids are looking after you yeah you're walking around like the guy in beetle juice with the tiny shrunken head right um yeah you don't want that to happen but you end up actually

Where you lose gray matter volume with a second pregnancy is actually in areas that are tied more to deploying, let's see, what's a good way to say this, like managing multiple inputs.

So those are areas that if you streamline and tune them, they're actually salient for taking care of multiple kids.

So it's kind of like task switching and being oriented cognitively to variable demands.

Right.

Those are the places where you see that sharpening of functioning in second time moms.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yes.

And the studies unfortunately exclude twin and triplet moms because they're going to add too much complexity.

It's a really interesting paradigm, right?

Because you kind of get double the dose of parenting experience and you get more parenting hormones too.

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