Changes You Experience After Becoming A Parent

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Once you are a parent, several things changes in your life, few are external and evident to you and your family. For example, you get entirely occupied with the baby, and you will start facing bodily changes. But, there is much more, and most of the changes you face are internal. Some changes may seem like a challenge if you are a new parent, but others are equally great too. Let us discuss a few ways your life, family, and mental changes when you become a parent and ways to cope with the transformation:

Emotional transformation of your brain

Studies conducted on new parents have shown that some parts of the brain lit up when they interact with their newborn. This change's intensity was extremely significant compared to the same emotions generated when the same person interacted with unrelated babies. When you become a parent, two central regions in your brain get triggers. One of them is the oxytocin-producing hypothalamus, and the other is the dopamine system.

With all this, we can understand that the brain responsible for creating more emotions in a person will be active when the newborn arrives in the family. Especially in mothers, these regions grow with high positive feelings for the newborn.

Emotions work hard towards caregiving

Once you are a parent, your brain puts efforts towards remodeling, and it gets ready for protecting and planning towards caregiving. The emotion-processing network in your mind works towards better emotion regulation and multi-tasking.

One more thing is, mothers are not the only ones who experience remodeling and changes. Even new father’s experience lights up in their brains, which is way different from nonparent fathers. Studies have also shown that the mentalizing network in the father’s mind becomes more active than before.

New parents experience sharpened attention

The Mentalizing network also contains higher cortex and thinking regions. Along with mentalizing, the area responsible for emotions work together, enhance attention, focus, and ground a new parent in the present moment. The emotions facilitate creating the ability to fulfill the baby's needs.

Life is more meaningful than before

Naturally, human beings improve and develop as an individual. But when the baby arrives, it stimulates self-analysis and self-reflection. The phase triggers feelings like, ‘a baby is depending on me’, ‘I have to be better and take the best care of myself.’ There is mixed opinion about the parenting phase since it is the phase where their happiness declined. It is not right for all, and if we have to measure the extent of joy, we must use a superficial metric. Committed parenting and loving relationships always bring deeper meaning that has to be measured using an external metric.

Human beings cannot expect and absorb only positive emotions. Even from parenting, you cannot demand just positive vibes. There are many elements to be considered when you become a parent. Other than positive emotions, it can offer many different factors that fuel your well-being. Parenting must be regarded as a new relationship that brings more meaning to your life!

Comment one change you encountered in yourself/your life after becoming a parent!

Preethi V Bhat is a prolific writer who loves to write different genre and is a full time writer
for past five years. Writer was working for Pencil9 and Coffeegraphy.
Currently she is associated with Sheer Analytics and Insights, Chakratech Services, and a member of We-talk Community.