Oxytocin & Dopamine
As your due date nears, your brain starts producing more and more oxytocin, a hormone that literally helps bring out the mother in you. Also known as the love hormone, oxytocin is responsible for maternal behavior like nuzzling and grooming in animals from rats to monkeys. For pregnant moms, its main job is to ease feelings of stress while fueling anticipation for the new arrival.
Oxytocin has attracted serious scientific interest in recent years. Animal studies suggest that it plays a huge role in all sorts of social behaviors, from raising babies to forming long-term relationships. Animals that don’t produce oxytocin ignore their offspring and find different mates every season. Species that do make the hormone tend to be doting parents that form lasting bonds with their mates. So when your body starts pumping out oxytocin during pregnancy, it’s as if love is coursing through your veins.
Your baby is also developing a bond with you, even in the womb. Studies show that his heart will beat a little faster at the sound of your voice. It’s something that will excite and comfort your child now and for years to come.
If you’re a dad, the second parent in a same-sex couple, or an adoptive parent expecting a new baby, you won’t experience the same hormonal boost and physical closeness with your developing child that pregnant moms do. But don’t worry, your bond with your child won’t suffer.
Babies and older children have the capacity to form tight bonds with any caregiver who responds to their physical and emotional needs. Attachment theory — the guiding psychological principle of human relationships — says that people of all ages become deeply connected with others who provide a sense of security and support.
As labor progresses, the stream of oxytocin in a mom-to-be’s brain and bloodstream becomes a torrent. Among its many other jobs, the hormone causes contractions and gets breast milk flowing. (It works so well that doctors routinely pump pitocin, a synthetic form of oxytocin, through an IV to induce labor.)
As a brand-new mom, you’ll be practically swimming in oxytocin when you finally get to hold your baby. The hormone can break through the exhaustion and pain of labor to give you a feeling of euphoria and intense love. According to pediatrician and child development expert Marshall Klaus, the potency of oxytocin helps explain why babies are almost never abandoned in hospitals that allow mothers to hold and nurse them in the first hour after birth.
New fathers aren’t immune to the bewitching nature of babies — or the effects of oxytocin — either. Like mothers, dads get a rush of the love hormone when they see their baby for the first time. That may help explain the unexpected emotions that sometimes overwhelm dads in the delivery room.
New dads experience other dramatic biological changes, too. A Canadian study in 2001 found that men’s testosterone levels tend to plummet (for a couple of months anyway) after they become dads for the first time. Even more intriguing, some men start to produce extra estrogen, perhaps the clearest sign of the transformative power of fatherhood. According to Diane Witt, a neuroscientist with the National Science Foundation, estrogen makes the brain more sensitive to oxytocin, presumably helping fathers become more loving and attentive.
Oxytocin isn’t the only love chemical. Dopamine, the main currency of pleasure in the brain, plays an important role in early bonding, too — for you and for your baby. As you hold, rock, or nurse your child, you both get a rush of this “reward” chemical.
While you’re savoring the high, dopamine is helping your baby attach emotionally to you. In 2004, Italian researchers put this together by observing baby mice: Those that couldn’t sense dopamine didn’t especially care whether or not their mom was around. It’s the strongest evidence yet that dopamine plays a crucial role in mother and infant bonding.
Incidentally, dopamine is what gives drug users a feeling of well-being when they’re high on heroin or cocaine. In a very real sense, addicts who get hooked on drugs are simply chasing the feeling that ideally flows between parent and child. Parental love just happens to be infinitely healthier.
