Slaughter, Sandberg and the Mommy Brain

The combination of work and family is a complicated challenge, framed lately by the perspectives of two women, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg.

• Sheryl Sandberg, 43, mother of two, has been the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008, author of Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, a book that accompanies the organization she created for working mothers. Regardless of the gender biases that still exist everywhere, Sandberg urges women to lean in, believe in themselves and stop doubting the ability to combine work and family.
  
  
• Anne-Marie Slaughter left a very senior position in the State Department last year to spend more time with her teenage sons. Her provocative question in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” triggered a passionate debate about the current state of work/life balance.

I wondered what Slaughter would say about Lean In. Her review was published today by The New York Times. Slaughter praises Sandberg while pointing out that companies also need to create an environment in which for women can balance life and work. Sandberg is, of course, right about her philosophy. What other choice do ambitious women who want kids have, after all? And Slaughter is right, for many reasons including the simple and obvious fact when companies place quality of life at the top of the culture, everybody wins. Only time will tell if Sandberg has a different perspective when her kids are older.

Sarah Lacy, also an ambitious young mother, wrote an excellent piece in which she wisely points out that neither of these women represent the rest of us. They are individuals with highly unique circumstances, and their stories, compelling as they may be, are theirs alone, even if other women are inspired by them to shape their own careers, lives and ideas differently as a result.

Missing from this debate is the fact that it’s one thing to imagine having a child, and another to deal with the reality of what that means when it happens. Since all children have different needs, it’s impossible to predict what motherhood, paired with professional ambitions, will look like. There’s a whole scientific aspect to this challenge that rarely, if ever, gets mentioned. Dr. Louann Brizendine wrote in The Female Brain that a mother’s love is like a drug, and brain monitoring equipment reveals the way oxytocin-activated regions light up as a result. To me, this sounds way more distracting than sleeping with a smartphone on the nightstand.

One issue that seldom gets brought up in this debate is the reality that giving birth actually changes a woman’s brain.

The Mommy Brain is a very real phenomenon, says Brizendrine, a neuropsychiatrist, who didn’t expect to want to stay “glued” to her child. A woman’s brain, she says, becomes “structurally, functionally and in many ways irreversibly” altered by motherhood. “In modern society,” Brizendrine warns, “where women are responsible not only for giving birth to children but working outside the home to support them economically, these changes in the brain create the most profound conflict of a mother’s life.”

Not every woman is affected in the same way, of course, but you have no way of knowing before you give birth where you’ll fall in on the spectrum. That reality is often completely ignored when this subject is discussed. We’re still stuck in a Stone Age mindset, Brizendrine says. It took human beings millions of years to evolve to our current state, and our brains adapted to living in primitive conditions. We inhabit bodies meant for the wild despite the fact that we now live in urban environments. Our deeply wired stress responses were designed to react to life-threatening challenges in ancient landscapes. As a result, Brizendrine says, women may react to the modern stresses of home, kids, work and the lack of significant support, and a “few unpaid bills can appear life-threatening.”

Brizendrine recalls being stunned to discover that her own “independent and self-sufficient lifestyle no longer worked” after she had a child. “A mother’s brain has virtually expanded its definition of self to include her child, so the needs of the child will become a biological imperative for the mother, perhaps more compelling to her brain than her own needs.”

As a woman, I rally behind Sandberg and believe that any one of us can thrive under the dual pressure of an ambitious, successful career and raising a happy, healthy family. Is it possible? Of course, especially if you’re lucky enough to give birth to children who don’t have the kind of special needs that require your full-time attention or at the very least, cause obsessive preoccupation even when you can afford the help of caregivers. But what if things don't work out the way I imagine they might?

Ultimately, Brizendrine seems to be more on the Slaughter side, calling for revolutionary changes in society. Does this shift toward a more equitable society require some women to refrain from having children so that they can maintain focus on the task of changing the world without the need to divide their time between their employers and families? This is the question that keeps me, and many women I know, grappling hard with this fundamental challenge.

The truck flipping adrenaline mothers have for their babies can also be applied to the whole world. We can create better systems, if only we had the time.

@RitaJKing

Image: rmolnar7