ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
If you're a new parent who is heading back to work, how's it going? The transition from worker to parent to working parent can be a complicated one. Life Kit reporter Andee Tagle spoke to a brain researcher about how to navigate your evolving identity at home and on the job.
ANDEE TAGLE, BYLINE: If you're headed back to the office after parental leave, you're likely in pursuit of that mythical work-life balance and very possibly feeling like you're failing in both arenas.
DARBY SAXBE: My best advice to parents is lower your standards. Don't expect that you're going to be amazing at everything.
TAGLE: Darby Saxbe is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California. Her upcoming book, "Dad Brain," is all about the science of fatherhood. She says no matter how you come to assume the role - man or woman, pregnancy, adoption, fostering - parenting is hugely transformational to the brain and body. It can take a long time to fully adjust to parenthood, much longer than you might expect.
SAXBE: There's evidence that we don't really bounce back, even if we ever bounce back, until two years or maybe more. And since many people have more than one kid, that sort of period of remodeling and adjustment can actually last even longer than those two years.
TAGLE: So in this season of life especially, try to let good be good enough. Your body is rewiring itself to meet the demands of this awesome, wild new gig.
SAXBE: I like to say great parents are made not born.
TAGLE: Once that little one enters your life, your hormone levels shift and change. You have increased emotional sensitivity. You lose gray matter volume in your brain. This is men and women, by the way. And sure, your brain getting smaller, on its face, might not sound great, but...
SAXBE: The brain is starting to work more efficiently. You're having to figure out what this little creature that can't talk to you needs and how to soothe them. You're really using your social brain, and you're using your empathetic brain, and we're developing stronger, faster connections when we become new parents.
TAGLE: OK, but what about that infamous post-baby mom brain? - or dad brain, both a thing. You know, that slow scatterbrain feeling brought on from sleep deprivation and that mountain of new responsibilities.
SAXBE: It's just the demand of taking care of an infant. It sort of changes our priorities, and your memory looks great if you're focusing on caregiving-relevant information.
TAGLE: And that shift can serve you in a lot of different areas of your life. Saxbe talked to one dad for her book, for example.
SAXBE: Who told me that taking time off to be a dad made him way better at work. It really improved his ability to manage employees. So there are a lot of transferable skills as we're developing that empathy and that patience when working with our own young kids that can really translate into making us better, more effective workers as well.
TAGLE: And of course, there's the purely logistical side of parenting, too.
SAXBE: A lot of parents report that, that, you know, having kids, because it introduces all these new complexities, can make them more disciplined and better at just getting things done.
TAGLE: Studies have even shown that parenting is neuroprotective later in life. And the more kids you have, the younger your brain looks as you age. For now, while you're still in the thick of it all, Saxbe's parting words of wisdom as both a parent researcher and a parent herself - find community. No one is supposed to do this alone.
SAXBE: The more that we seek out support and we lean on people in our lives, the easier it can be to get through those first few years of early parenthood.
TAGLE: And the easier it is to parent, the easier it is to make working parenthood work for you.
For NPR's Life Kit, I'm Andee Tagle.
FLORIDO: For more tips from Life Kit, go to npr.org/lifekit. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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