bethebookworm's review against another edition
4.0
Is it weird to call a popular science book delightful? Because this was. I learned a few things, had a few misconceptions straightened out, and even where I already knew the material or where the big idea was "we don't really know yet", it was engaging. Also mammals are weird and humans are weird mammals.
sarahfett's review against another edition
4.0
This book was interesting, and I listened to the beginning of it. I had to return it to the library before finishing it, but I may come back to it again.
kwugirl's review against another edition
4.0
So many fun science facts!! Though I don't recommend this for vegans, as much of the research review is with other vertebrates like mice and monkeys and some of the scenarios are at least a bit cruel. Otherwise though, a fun pop science book with personal memoir shared throughout in a conversational tone (occasionally a little too casual for me, such as "For us there's almost always an au pair (heaven forbid a pretty one)...waiting in the wings").
Highlights:
- hormones, man.
- we should have more paid maternity leave, but also, I'm further reinforced in thinking that paternity leave is really important and effective for more equality; dads need to spend more time with their kids to be good fathers
- our brains and bodies are amazing and can take a lot though also both moms and babies do better with consistency
Fetal microchimerism:
- After surgically injuring mother mice to simulate a heart attack, and then cutting out and dissecting their tiny tickers, she and her research team discovered just what they expected: heart cells with DAN that doesn't match the mother's own
- Scientists find rogue fetal cells while dissecting the cadavers of old ladies, whose littlest babies are now middle-aged men. Long after giving birth, the bodies of surrogate mothers are scattered with the genes of strangers' progeny.
- The fetus is designed to protect the mother, the organism most essential to its future survival
- One decade-long Dutch study tracked 190 women in their fifties and sixties, and those with detectable leftover baby cells were less likely to die of virtually everything.
- In a particularly famous case, doctors discovered that a son's lingering cells had rebuilt an entire lobe of one woman's ruined liver. (The case is notable mostly because the mother in question had no children. Her son had never been born but was living on, after an abortion, inside her.)
Breastfeeding:
- Internal gestation helps explain mammals' riotous global success: pregnancy keeps our youngsters warm, fed, and shielded from predators and lets us infiltrate even the harshest environments. But the same nifty adaptations that helped us to outlast the dinosaurs have also left females holding the diaper bag...for human moms in particular, the type of milk that we make is unusually thin and watery. Other mammals spend far less time nursing their young. For wild rabbits, with their rich milk, it's about 5 minutes a day. Fur seals may nurse only once a week.
- Even if their tots aren't present, lactating mothers are more aggressive than formula-feeders.
- once our boys are born, we do concoct higher-calorie milk for them. A study of several dozen healthy new moms in Massachusetts showed that boy milk had 25 percent greater energy content than girl milk, proof of boys' inherent energetic drain. Many mammals make higher-fact milk for male babies, especially in species like ours where adult males are larger, and size may impact future mating opportunities.
- This is called "lactational programming." Funneling a kid extra stress hormones, like cortisol, in your breast milk may result in a more nervous, less confident baby, born braced for disaster. In monkeys, these high-cortisol babies grow unusually quickly, prioritizing growth instead of social exploration, perhaps to up their chances of clobbering their unfriendly neighbors.
Emotions:
- "Sensitization" is science's term for our experience. It's almost as though our nerves extend out of our bodies. I think sensitization explains why mothers have a hard time watching movies or even TV commercials involving suffering children. We feel it too deeply.
- this suppressed reactivity--this dulling of feeling, you might say--could explain the evolved drive behind the "baby blues" that more than 50 percent of new moms experience
- Next to love, the most commonly cited maternal emotion is rage
- A brand-new baby's most likely murderer is his or her own biological mother--and across the world, mothers under age twenty are the most likely to kill their kids, and older moms are the least likely.
- the birth of a third child, in particular, seems to herald a slight uptick of maternal mental woes, especially if the new kid is a different gender from the first pair. And having a boy ratchets up a mother's depression risk regardless.
Different reactions to different stressors:
- pregnant women and new mothers are calmer than other people in the face of environmental stress...in experimental settings, mothers-to-be are less aroused by displays of deliberate rudeness and have lower heart rates during psychologically stressful events like mock job interviews.
- The stresses that threaten moms the most, it turns out, are very often not events like fires and earthquakes. We're built to handle sudden catastrophe. What messes with moms are creeping, chronic, and often invisible problems. Poverty. Hunger. Diapers.
- Economists have long understood that the birth rate and the economy are intimately linked--a $10k increase in average housing prices leads to a 2 percent drop in renters' birth rates
- A study of unemployment rates in Denmark from 1995 to 2009 showed that jumps in joblessness corresponded with a national uptick in miscarriage rates. Although there was a matching rise in the abortion rate, some women's bodies--sensing long-term hardship on the horizon--seemed to cut short their pregnancies without any outside intervention or conscious choice.
Bruckner calculates that a 1 percent drop in a California city's employment predicts an 8 percent increase in "infant mortality due to unintentional injury" that same month.
- it wasn't the hustling monkeys with the poorly stocked carts whose mothering nosedived. (Despite all the food hoopla, nobody ever starved.) It was the moms who got an unpredictable mix of both kinds of wheelbarrows, on a schedule alternating every two weeks. These monkey moms, experiencing a bonanza one day and a bust the next, were the ones who fell apart, experiencing a more than 25 percent increase in their stress hormones and swiftly disintegrating caregiving. Even though there was no caloric shortage, the perception that there might be was there...it suggest that what mammalian mothers should fear most is fear itself.
- Everybody has stress...You don't have to be living in poverty to have stress. But for people with higher economic status it's rarer to experience multiple things at the same time.
- [X- or Y-bearing sperm] each have roughly 50-50 odds. But that's not the end of the story, because the mom's body scraps about half of all pregnancies after fertilization. Fetal sex appears to figure into this hidden cull, with our bodies offering safer harbor to boys or girls depending on environmental cues. When the outlook is rosy and the mom is stress-free and in shipshape condition, according to some evolutionary biologists, her body is primed to favor sons. Boys are bigger, feebler, and more taxing to gestate, but--in good times, at least--they can later pay evolutionary dividends if they grow up strong and strapping, woo widely, and sire a bumper crop of grand-offspring. Baby girls, on the other hand, may be the smarter play if a mom's world is wobbling. There's less of a physical and energetic down payment up front, and while daughters probably won't procreate like a Casanova or a Jagger, they are more likely to cough up a couple of grandchildren even in difficult environmental circumstances.
Brains & hormones:
- a key difference between biological moms and dads is this: new moms are hormonally primed to seek out experience with infants, while new dads must have those experiences in order to get their hormones rolling. Men don't metamorphose into instinctive fathers after a one-night stand if they never have contact with the woman again--the way the woman will (if impregnated) automatically change into a mother. Fatherhood is a far more elective process. To become a father, the first thing a guy has to do is stick around, and many don't.
- The female brain is more ready to be induced...the threshold for males is much higher.
- Alongside the previously described and somewhat distressing evidence for the withering of moms' gray matter, with 7 percent losses in some women, other researchers have found that the maternal brain *grows* in similar areas. This contradiction is somewhat mystifying to the researchers themselves, though it likely has to do with the different methods that various labs use to measure brain volume.
- once they are exposed to pups for the long term, the brains of these initially reluctant rodent caregivers also start to change. Measurable physical alterations accompany the onset of maternal care in females who have never given birth...the maternal instinct is so essential to the mammalian makeup that males, too, have a maternal seed buried deep in their brains.
Potential policy implications:
- The mom's behavior isn't necessarily the wrong behavior...it's the right behavior for the wrong environment. Maybe a spoiled upper-middle-class "special snowflake," whose fawning mommy's brain passed every "responsiveness" scan with flying colors, wouldn't have a snowflake's chance in a poor child's version of reality.
- A mother creates a child who reflects her life experience. And that child, in turn, continues to shape the mother, cementing the feedback loop. Poor mom's environmental responses may not just be acceptable--they may be smart. The concepts of 'good parenting' and 'bad parenting,' independent of context, are illogical...Instead, high and low effort parenting strategies are conditional; that is, different strategies are adapted to different social and ecological conditions.
- To an extent, the identity of our cheerleaders doesn't even matter all that much. Pregnant women who are visited at home even occasionally by paid strangers, like nurses, often fare better as mothers later on and are less likely to abuse their kids.
- while marital status remains a predictor of mothering quality, moms who master their own fates and end up as single mothers *by their choice* may fare just as well as or better than moms whose marriages offer more pain and heartache than support.
- national wealth did not predict mothers' mental health...Nepal--where the infant death rate is still five time higher than America's and where 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line--enjoyed one of the globe's lowest postpartum depression rates, second only to Singapore's. What might mothers lose as societies grow richer? We might lose community...Universally poor Nepal and wealthy Singapore don't have tons in common, but Singapore does boast milder income inequality than many rich societies. That gap between the rich and the poor is the real problem for many moms...it's mom's *feeling* like they don't have enough resources.
- One researcher recommended to me that the hospitals be restructured so that every mom, or at the very least the high-risk ones, undergoes the whole admission-to-discharge journey with a small team that truly knows her story, even if the exact same nurse...isn't there every step of the way. As it is, maternity wards have a freaky deja vu feel as you endlessly recite the same information to different people, yet a medical student still nudges you awake at 3am to inquire when the first day of your last menstrual cycle was.
In Finland, though, moms are kitted out with identical deluxe survival kits, which may include, among dozens of other goodies, an infant mattress, a makeshift crib, and (this being Finland) a tiny snowsuit. These are not merely material gifts. They are psychological tonics. They take some of the guesswork out of a mom's environment and signal that somebody, somewhere, cares that our needs and our child's are met. Also, to hierarchy-aware moms, there's comfort in knowing that every woman begins with the exact same baby box.
Other:
- our aggressive placentas funnel away more resources than biological mothers can afford to give, risking maternal lives in a unique play that would seem counterproductive...Maybe our systems take on the risk because maternal demise is not a death sentence for a human baby, the way it is for most mammals.
- According to the latest research, moms hit mobile consumer apps starting at 5am and reporting shop 15 percent faster than other people.
Highlights:
- hormones, man.
- we should have more paid maternity leave, but also, I'm further reinforced in thinking that paternity leave is really important and effective for more equality; dads need to spend more time with their kids to be good fathers
- our brains and bodies are amazing and can take a lot though also both moms and babies do better with consistency
Fetal microchimerism:
- After surgically injuring mother mice to simulate a heart attack, and then cutting out and dissecting their tiny tickers, she and her research team discovered just what they expected: heart cells with DAN that doesn't match the mother's own
- Scientists find rogue fetal cells while dissecting the cadavers of old ladies, whose littlest babies are now middle-aged men. Long after giving birth, the bodies of surrogate mothers are scattered with the genes of strangers' progeny.
- The fetus is designed to protect the mother, the organism most essential to its future survival
- One decade-long Dutch study tracked 190 women in their fifties and sixties, and those with detectable leftover baby cells were less likely to die of virtually everything.
- In a particularly famous case, doctors discovered that a son's lingering cells had rebuilt an entire lobe of one woman's ruined liver. (The case is notable mostly because the mother in question had no children. Her son had never been born but was living on, after an abortion, inside her.)
Breastfeeding:
- Internal gestation helps explain mammals' riotous global success: pregnancy keeps our youngsters warm, fed, and shielded from predators and lets us infiltrate even the harshest environments. But the same nifty adaptations that helped us to outlast the dinosaurs have also left females holding the diaper bag...for human moms in particular, the type of milk that we make is unusually thin and watery. Other mammals spend far less time nursing their young. For wild rabbits, with their rich milk, it's about 5 minutes a day. Fur seals may nurse only once a week.
- Even if their tots aren't present, lactating mothers are more aggressive than formula-feeders.
- once our boys are born, we do concoct higher-calorie milk for them. A study of several dozen healthy new moms in Massachusetts showed that boy milk had 25 percent greater energy content than girl milk, proof of boys' inherent energetic drain. Many mammals make higher-fact milk for male babies, especially in species like ours where adult males are larger, and size may impact future mating opportunities.
- This is called "lactational programming." Funneling a kid extra stress hormones, like cortisol, in your breast milk may result in a more nervous, less confident baby, born braced for disaster. In monkeys, these high-cortisol babies grow unusually quickly, prioritizing growth instead of social exploration, perhaps to up their chances of clobbering their unfriendly neighbors.
Emotions:
- "Sensitization" is science's term for our experience. It's almost as though our nerves extend out of our bodies. I think sensitization explains why mothers have a hard time watching movies or even TV commercials involving suffering children. We feel it too deeply.
- this suppressed reactivity--this dulling of feeling, you might say--could explain the evolved drive behind the "baby blues" that more than 50 percent of new moms experience
- Next to love, the most commonly cited maternal emotion is rage
- A brand-new baby's most likely murderer is his or her own biological mother--and across the world, mothers under age twenty are the most likely to kill their kids, and older moms are the least likely.
- the birth of a third child, in particular, seems to herald a slight uptick of maternal mental woes, especially if the new kid is a different gender from the first pair. And having a boy ratchets up a mother's depression risk regardless.
Different reactions to different stressors:
- pregnant women and new mothers are calmer than other people in the face of environmental stress...in experimental settings, mothers-to-be are less aroused by displays of deliberate rudeness and have lower heart rates during psychologically stressful events like mock job interviews.
- The stresses that threaten moms the most, it turns out, are very often not events like fires and earthquakes. We're built to handle sudden catastrophe. What messes with moms are creeping, chronic, and often invisible problems. Poverty. Hunger. Diapers.
- Economists have long understood that the birth rate and the economy are intimately linked--a $10k increase in average housing prices leads to a 2 percent drop in renters' birth rates
- A study of unemployment rates in Denmark from 1995 to 2009 showed that jumps in joblessness corresponded with a national uptick in miscarriage rates. Although there was a matching rise in the abortion rate, some women's bodies--sensing long-term hardship on the horizon--seemed to cut short their pregnancies without any outside intervention or conscious choice.
Bruckner calculates that a 1 percent drop in a California city's employment predicts an 8 percent increase in "infant mortality due to unintentional injury" that same month.
- it wasn't the hustling monkeys with the poorly stocked carts whose mothering nosedived. (Despite all the food hoopla, nobody ever starved.) It was the moms who got an unpredictable mix of both kinds of wheelbarrows, on a schedule alternating every two weeks. These monkey moms, experiencing a bonanza one day and a bust the next, were the ones who fell apart, experiencing a more than 25 percent increase in their stress hormones and swiftly disintegrating caregiving. Even though there was no caloric shortage, the perception that there might be was there...it suggest that what mammalian mothers should fear most is fear itself.
- Everybody has stress...You don't have to be living in poverty to have stress. But for people with higher economic status it's rarer to experience multiple things at the same time.
- [X- or Y-bearing sperm] each have roughly 50-50 odds. But that's not the end of the story, because the mom's body scraps about half of all pregnancies after fertilization. Fetal sex appears to figure into this hidden cull, with our bodies offering safer harbor to boys or girls depending on environmental cues. When the outlook is rosy and the mom is stress-free and in shipshape condition, according to some evolutionary biologists, her body is primed to favor sons. Boys are bigger, feebler, and more taxing to gestate, but--in good times, at least--they can later pay evolutionary dividends if they grow up strong and strapping, woo widely, and sire a bumper crop of grand-offspring. Baby girls, on the other hand, may be the smarter play if a mom's world is wobbling. There's less of a physical and energetic down payment up front, and while daughters probably won't procreate like a Casanova or a Jagger, they are more likely to cough up a couple of grandchildren even in difficult environmental circumstances.
Brains & hormones:
- a key difference between biological moms and dads is this: new moms are hormonally primed to seek out experience with infants, while new dads must have those experiences in order to get their hormones rolling. Men don't metamorphose into instinctive fathers after a one-night stand if they never have contact with the woman again--the way the woman will (if impregnated) automatically change into a mother. Fatherhood is a far more elective process. To become a father, the first thing a guy has to do is stick around, and many don't.
- The female brain is more ready to be induced...the threshold for males is much higher.
- Alongside the previously described and somewhat distressing evidence for the withering of moms' gray matter, with 7 percent losses in some women, other researchers have found that the maternal brain *grows* in similar areas. This contradiction is somewhat mystifying to the researchers themselves, though it likely has to do with the different methods that various labs use to measure brain volume.
- once they are exposed to pups for the long term, the brains of these initially reluctant rodent caregivers also start to change. Measurable physical alterations accompany the onset of maternal care in females who have never given birth...the maternal instinct is so essential to the mammalian makeup that males, too, have a maternal seed buried deep in their brains.
Potential policy implications:
- The mom's behavior isn't necessarily the wrong behavior...it's the right behavior for the wrong environment. Maybe a spoiled upper-middle-class "special snowflake," whose fawning mommy's brain passed every "responsiveness" scan with flying colors, wouldn't have a snowflake's chance in a poor child's version of reality.
- A mother creates a child who reflects her life experience. And that child, in turn, continues to shape the mother, cementing the feedback loop. Poor mom's environmental responses may not just be acceptable--they may be smart. The concepts of 'good parenting' and 'bad parenting,' independent of context, are illogical...Instead, high and low effort parenting strategies are conditional; that is, different strategies are adapted to different social and ecological conditions.
- To an extent, the identity of our cheerleaders doesn't even matter all that much. Pregnant women who are visited at home even occasionally by paid strangers, like nurses, often fare better as mothers later on and are less likely to abuse their kids.
- while marital status remains a predictor of mothering quality, moms who master their own fates and end up as single mothers *by their choice* may fare just as well as or better than moms whose marriages offer more pain and heartache than support.
- national wealth did not predict mothers' mental health...Nepal--where the infant death rate is still five time higher than America's and where 25 percent of the population lives below the poverty line--enjoyed one of the globe's lowest postpartum depression rates, second only to Singapore's. What might mothers lose as societies grow richer? We might lose community...Universally poor Nepal and wealthy Singapore don't have tons in common, but Singapore does boast milder income inequality than many rich societies. That gap between the rich and the poor is the real problem for many moms...it's mom's *feeling* like they don't have enough resources.
- One researcher recommended to me that the hospitals be restructured so that every mom, or at the very least the high-risk ones, undergoes the whole admission-to-discharge journey with a small team that truly knows her story, even if the exact same nurse...isn't there every step of the way. As it is, maternity wards have a freaky deja vu feel as you endlessly recite the same information to different people, yet a medical student still nudges you awake at 3am to inquire when the first day of your last menstrual cycle was.
In Finland, though, moms are kitted out with identical deluxe survival kits, which may include, among dozens of other goodies, an infant mattress, a makeshift crib, and (this being Finland) a tiny snowsuit. These are not merely material gifts. They are psychological tonics. They take some of the guesswork out of a mom's environment and signal that somebody, somewhere, cares that our needs and our child's are met. Also, to hierarchy-aware moms, there's comfort in knowing that every woman begins with the exact same baby box.
Other:
- our aggressive placentas funnel away more resources than biological mothers can afford to give, risking maternal lives in a unique play that would seem counterproductive...Maybe our systems take on the risk because maternal demise is not a death sentence for a human baby, the way it is for most mammals.
- According to the latest research, moms hit mobile consumer apps starting at 5am and reporting shop 15 percent faster than other people.
panireads's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
mlbenners's review against another edition
4.0
A well-researched and fascinating book! The author does a wonderful job making the content relatable and interesting by using personal anecdote and humor. Thank you to Gallery Books and Goodreads for my giveaway win!
elizabethferguson's review against another edition
3.0
Thank you to Goodreads, Gallery Books, and Abigail Tucker for the free advance copy of Mom Genes!
Mom Genes takes a rare look at the science behind the “maternal instinct” and why, perhaps, moms are the way they are. Abigail Tucker explores countless studies that examine motherhood in the animal kingdom and the implications they have for our human parental experiences. The research spans the globe and includes an intriguing variety of topics related to maternity. For instance, why do most moms (and even dads) instinctively hold their babies on their left hip? Tucker also discusses the possible genetic connection between mothering behaviors across generations, fetal stimulation, and lots, lots more. These types of behaviors and reactions are things I never thought twice about, but they are integral to understanding what makes moms tick, and this book has made me hyper aware of them.
Tucker also, importantly, points out the impacts of socioeconomic status, marriage status, job status, etc. on mothers and their maternal behaviors. She notes a lawyer who was required to return to court days after giving birth, single moms who have to work low-paying jobs to put food on the table, and the fortunate others who returned to flexible and accommodating work environments postpartum. While the majority of the book focuses on the innate drives and subconscious behaviors that shape mothers, Tucker does well to include many of the external factors that also play a major role in how we tackle motherhood.
To be sure, no two moms are the same—except maybe in our collective struggle to survive each of our children’s wild phases, which somehow seem to get progressively more challenging. But Tucker doesn’t assert that all mothers experience the maternal instinct in the same way or to the same degree. What she does is string together a series of incredibly relatable stories from her life as a mom and present the scientific evidence to explain them. Her book is full of surprising facts and findings and is a great read for moms or anyone else curious about this niche area of genetics. Get yourself a copy when it goes on sale in April 2021!
Mom Genes takes a rare look at the science behind the “maternal instinct” and why, perhaps, moms are the way they are. Abigail Tucker explores countless studies that examine motherhood in the animal kingdom and the implications they have for our human parental experiences. The research spans the globe and includes an intriguing variety of topics related to maternity. For instance, why do most moms (and even dads) instinctively hold their babies on their left hip? Tucker also discusses the possible genetic connection between mothering behaviors across generations, fetal stimulation, and lots, lots more. These types of behaviors and reactions are things I never thought twice about, but they are integral to understanding what makes moms tick, and this book has made me hyper aware of them.
Tucker also, importantly, points out the impacts of socioeconomic status, marriage status, job status, etc. on mothers and their maternal behaviors. She notes a lawyer who was required to return to court days after giving birth, single moms who have to work low-paying jobs to put food on the table, and the fortunate others who returned to flexible and accommodating work environments postpartum. While the majority of the book focuses on the innate drives and subconscious behaviors that shape mothers, Tucker does well to include many of the external factors that also play a major role in how we tackle motherhood.
To be sure, no two moms are the same—except maybe in our collective struggle to survive each of our children’s wild phases, which somehow seem to get progressively more challenging. But Tucker doesn’t assert that all mothers experience the maternal instinct in the same way or to the same degree. What she does is string together a series of incredibly relatable stories from her life as a mom and present the scientific evidence to explain them. Her book is full of surprising facts and findings and is a great read for moms or anyone else curious about this niche area of genetics. Get yourself a copy when it goes on sale in April 2021!