Changes after childbirth can make moms smarter

The pressures and insecurities many new moms feel both at home and on the job after their plunge into motherhood are common, according to author Katherine Ellison, but they can make it difficult for moms to find a balance between home life and work life.

In “The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter” (Perseus, $15), Ellison faces down fears many women harbor that kids will make them too scattered, frazzled and ditsy to be valuable in the business world. Her book tracks Ellison’s exploration of on-the-cusp scientific research in neurology and psychology. It all suggests that motherhood has the potential to make women better at many tasks, including managing stress, multitasking and dealing with people.

“There are changes in the brain (during pregnancy and early motherhood) – concrete, measurable changes, and later, the way we think and behave is changed,” she says.

Ellison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, delayed her own pregnancy until well into her 30s out of fear that motherhood would dumb her down.

Motherhood turned out to be stressful and exhausting. However, Ellison never developed the “mommy brain” she feared, that mythically ditsy mind-set that causes moms to leave their purse in the refrigerator and drop off the baby at the dry cleaners.

When she set out to research the book, in part to reassure herself that her worst intellectual fears were unfounded, she came to the conclusion that motherhood should be looked at as a time for learning.

She plumbed studies of rat mothers. With more women in science, “There’s beginning to be a critical mass of research on emotional intelligence and parents’ brains.”

Ellison calls it the “baby-boosted brain” and identifies five attributes of the new mommy mind:

• Perception. Studies show motherhood may improve a woman’s sense of smell, hearing and make her more attuned visually to infant movement. “Motherhood is an especially powerful experience because it involves ‘Learning under high-stakes conditions, which is just the sort of learning that drives change in the brain,’ ” Ellison wrote.

• Efficiency. “Working mothers become masters of time management,” Ellison wrote. New mothers can have sharper attention, improved focus and become better at prioritizing.

• Resiliency. Studies of the hormone oxytocin, which strengthens social interactions, might also help memory and learning, Ellison says. One study of nursing mothers showed oxytocin makes women less reactive to stress hormones, and therefore less anxious, bored, suspicious and more calm and sociable.

• Motivation. Human mothers have a “powerful drive to be with their babies, nurture them and keep them safe.” Motherhood can provide women with a self-esteem boost that pushes them to try new tasks. Studies of rats show mothers may be better able to conquer fear. Motherhood can also better enable women to create boundaries, such as limiting time at work to protect their home life.

• Emotional intelligence. Mothers must be cued in to the tiniest clues to sense their babies’ needs. “Empathy frequently informs our earliest days with our infants as we try to figure out what they need, how to comfort and satisfy them,” she wrote. In addition to better people reading skills, mothers develop a more empathetic style of speech.