Please remove your fingers from the nuclear release button and hear me out!
This question comes from a discussion I had with a female colleague, she insisted that after she had given birth she felt she was noticably less able to concentrate, learn and understand things than beforehand.
Now I said that she was either taking the hand, mistaken or crazy so we asked another female colleague blessed with child and she instantly confirmed what the first woman had asserted.
Now I still don’t believe that for a moment but they both seemed quite insistent that its true.
As such I throw the question out to the cool, calculating, machine-like super-intelligences of the dope!
If you ask them whether they found new motherhood to be unbelievably exhausting, taking exhaustion to a level they could not previously have imagined, making them realise that nothing else they had ever done had tired them in a way remotely comparable, then you might have some idea why they found concentration and comprehension a bit of a challenge.
But don’t worry. After about twenty years or so it gets better.
Yes, it’s true. But as UDS pointed out, it’s from lack of sleep.
It’s also from worrying about the baby 24/7. The baby is totally dependent on other people for a really long time, and almost always “other people” is the mother. That’s a hell of a responsibility.
I’m a single dad and I’ve always felt like parenthood has made me less intelligent due to a couple of reasons. Like everyone else mentioned, it’s freaking exhausting. My kid is 4 now so it’s a little better, but now she talks to me every 3 seconds. I enjoy it, but can’t complete a thought of my own a lot of the time. When she was younger, she was constantly needing milk, food, help with clothes, shoes, potty, reaching a toy, help figuring out the toy, help fixing the toy, help showing her how to do something and help with about 1000 other things. I remember days where I wished I could sit down for more than 30 seconds without having to get back up.
I used to get interested in a subject, buy a couple textbooks on it and read them front to back. Now, my mind is always thinking about toys, parks, daycare, bathtime, dinner, clothes, etc and I buy paperbacks and give up about 1/3 of the way through. I can barely squeeze in the things I really love so when it comes to something new that could actually exercise my brain, give me the cliff notes and make them extremely interesting or I’m out.
I don’t know from women’s experiences, but becoming a parent definitely caused me to reevaluate myself from one of the smartest, hippest people on the planet to (approximately) a total dipstick.
I used to be preoccupied with all manner of arcana: Perceptual psychology, animation based on fractal geometry using my own formulas – expanding my Old English vocabulary and literary exposure, tracing the influence of hermetic thought throughout the body of English literature, dabbling in stereography and holography, blah blah blah.
As a dad, I work… and work… and watch TV… and will be happy to tell you about the cutest outfit I picked up for my baby girl today.
Yep - sleep deprivation. Last night my 10 month old woke in the middle of the night, and taking into account time to see if she could settle herself, a little settling, feeding and then trying to get back to sleep, I was awake for close to 2 hours. I got 2 blocks of 3 hour sleep in total last night. It’s been like that off and on for 10 months - how well do you think you’d function getting only 75% of the sleep you need for weeks on end?
I have to disagree with the people who say it’s sleep deprivation, because I haven’t really been sleep deprived for a while, and in some ways I do think I’m noticeably less acute than pre-baby.
The most obvious one is word related. I forget words a LOT. I have to stop in the middle of sentences and let my brain churn while I figure out what the right word is for the concept I’m trying to express, which is often something completely obvious. “Stick”, or “car”, or “train station” or something like that.
This started when I was pregnant the first time, and really hasn’t ever gone away. We call it “baby related noun loss”, in our household.
On teh other hand, my analytic and multitasking skills are just fine. But my ability to understand techincal things went right down, which was pretty noticeable, since I’m a programmer by trade. Of course, that could just be because I’m getting old as well.
Similar experience, and I was a sys admin - I went into technical project management eventually. I just seem slower. But my kids came late, so it could be age. And it could be time as well - before kids I had time to spend an extra few hours pouring over something to figure it out - now I have the enforced attention span of a gerbil when the kids are around - “MOM!!!” and correspondingly less time for self improvement - or just self maintenance.
Sleep deprivation may play a part, but it’s by no means thw whole story. Of course hormonal changes in the body could have an effect on other systems, including the CNS. When my wife was pregnant, she often complained that “I’m so dumb!” That is, she became absent-minded (formerly my job in the household), she forgot words she knew she knew, and she had substantial trouble concentrating for long periods. Fortunately for her, it didn’t last post-partum. But yeah, it’s a real thing.
I have also heard from many mothers (not just new ones) that they noticed a worsening of some cognitive abilities starting during early pregnancy, and never got back to what they considered normal after they were parents. I most often hear it called ‘pregnancy brain’ and the effects are said to be lasting. I worry about this a bit because I’m been a space cadet my whole life, it’s not going to easy if I get worse.
I agree with that the most plausible explanation is some combination of hormonal fluctuations (which do have these effects during and after pregnancy), the hard work and sleep deprivation that babies and young children entail, and the natural consequences of aging.
