Myself through that. One of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special or what is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates. And one of the things thats very remarkable about humans is we have an exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. And human babies are pretty much totallyless, and even throughout their juvenile period they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. And i think that tells us in humans, particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. Rose episode two of the charlie rose brain series three it underwritten by the Sloan Foundation coming up. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose tonight, we continue our exploration of the magnificent human brain with a look at the neurobiology of parenting. Neurobiologists are increasingly beginning to understand the brains influence on parental behavior. We now understand the act of caring for children can activate special neural circuitry that forms a Parenting Network in the brain. Research version identified cells that influence both the nurturing and reglect of children. This work has revealed new insight about gender roles and parenting. New studies suggest that the maternal instinct is not unique to women. Mens brains also change as they take care of their children. They also suffer from postpartum depression. David levine experienced this condition firsthand after the birth of his son. He joins me today to talk about his experience. Also here to talk about the brain and the biology of parent regular a Remarkable Group of scientists. Catherine dulac of harvard university. Susanne shultz of the university of manchester. Charles nelson of harvard medical school. Margaret spinelli of Columbia University. And once again my cohost dr. Eric kandel. He is a Nobel Laureate a professor at Columbia University and a Howard Hughes medical investigator. Im pleased to have all of them here at this table this evening. In discussing the biology of parenting, were going to discuss a number of topics. One is the remarkable similarity of parenting throughout the animal kingdom. Were also going to discuss the consequences of parental neglect and how disastrous that can be. And were also going to consider the hormonal changes that occur with postpartum depression. Let me put this in a somewhat broader context. In the last prospect, we considered the biology of aggression. And we learned that from David Andersons work, that the hypothalamus is concerned with aggression. There are neurons in the hypothalamus that are recruited for aggression. And interestingly, theyre located, as we see in the image right next to neurons concerned with mating. Moreover, theres a population in between about 20 of neurons, that can respond to either of those two instinctual drives depending on intensity of stimulation. If you stimulate weekly, you recruit mating behavior. If you stimulate strongly, you recruit fighting. This principle of having cells mediating different aspects of the same instinctive behavior is, number one characteristic of the hypothalamus, and also applies to parenting. Catherine dulac has discovered independently that there are two populations of cells that that are concerned with parenting and those that are concerned with parental neglect. And this is really opened up as whole inquiry into the nature of the biology of parenting, and were learning a great deal of what leads to Good Parenting and what leads to parental neglect and what the consequences are. Now, the interest in this actually began much earlier in the early 1940s a psychoanalyst by the name renee spitz carried oit a remarkable study. He studied children isolated from their mothering at birth living in two very different environments. One environment was connected with a prison, where the women delivered, nursing home, really sort of a nursery. And the other was a founding home in which children were dropped off because they were abandoned by their parents, by their mother. The two institutions functioned very differently. In the nursing home, the mothers themselves took care of the infants, their own infants. And because these were special times during the day they were allowed to interact with the infants, they really bestowed a lot of attention air, lot of affection on the kids. In the found ling home, there were nurses assigned to the children, and one nurse cook took care of seven children. As a result, each child received a limited amount of attention and lived in a situation of relative sensory deprivation social deprivation. When these kids were examined a year later the differences were already quite apparent. The kids in the nursing home that had contacts with their mother were like kids raised in manhattan they were happy interacted very well with people around them. The kids in the founding home were anxious and not very curious about what was going on around them. At ages two and three the differences were even more dramatic. The kids who were in the nursing home talked and walked and were very gregarious in acting with one another. The kids in the founding home, most of them could not walk, most of them could not walk, and those that could talk expressed themselves with few words. Subsequent studies have confirmed this and shown there is a critical period of development, if you deprive children of appropriate interaction, parental social contact, it really affects them for the rest of their lives. A comparable period of isolation later in life has very little effects. So were going to have a wonderful discussion about these topics and we have really five spectacular people here. We can Catherine Dulac who made this wonderful discovery about the cells in the hypothalamus that are involved in parenting. We have Susanne Shultz who has been interested in the evolution of parental behavior and interested in hormonal changes in parenting. Chuck nelson has been studying a remarkable orphanage in romanian in which children have lived in surprisingly isolated conditions and not only described the cognitive alterations but alterationing in the brain function and structure as a result of that. Margaret spinelli is a psychiatrist, like myself, except competent. And she is interested in postpartum depression. And she is going to tell bus hormonal changes that are associated with it, some of the things that are likely to increase the likelihood of depression, and also therapeutic approaches to available to it. 10 to 20 of women come down with postpartum depression. Postpartum depression, as you mentioned, also occurs in men and david is a person who suffered from this. Its 5 to 10 of men. The reason one doesnt know more about this is because most men are reluctant to discuss it. Were so fortunate to have david here. Rose absolutely. Who is a physician, a pediatrician, but has the courage to discuss it, which is not only wonderful for us but really beneficial from other people who might suffer from postpartum depression to realize to talk about it is normal. This is nothing to be ashamed of. And it may be helpful for both the person who suffers from it and the people around him. Were in for a terrific program which may make us better parents, better grandparents and better god parents. Rose let me begin with Catherine Dulac, andac sc this question as to how we behave as parents is wider as we drill down. As david describes, human parents, this behavior is absolutely essential for the Proper Development of the child. In addition, parenting is one of the strongest and most enduring social bond in human societies. Now, remarkable, parental behavior is widely observed in the animal kingdom. In mammals females lactate, and, therefore, they take primary responsibility of the parental care as can be seen in this very nice slide. This female chimpanzee is watching over the first step of her child. So females are very frequently maternal and not only in mammals but also in some species of birds frogz reptile, insects. Now, what about fathers . Well, the contribution of males in parenting is very variable. In some species as seen for example here in this silverback mountain guerilla playing with his infants. In some cases they are paernl paternal and nurture their young. In some species males attack the children and sometimes kill them. Im a neurobiologist, and the group used a mouse to try tond the basic biology of parental behavior. We would like to identify the brain areas that are involved in driving parental behavior and we would like to understand how this brain areas regulated in order to have animals that are parenting and some animals that are neglecting their infants. Now, in females, mothers as well as nonmothers are spontaneously maternal, which means that when they are put in presence with perps they will spontaneously build a nest. They will retrieve the perp to the nest, groom them, and huddle with them for long periods. In contrast, males are infanticidal. They will readily attack the perpsperps and kill them. However, males that have access to the females become paternal three weeks after mating with a female which correspond exactly to the gestation time in mice. In other words males who become father also become paternal. So we took advantage of this extremely interesting paradigm and differences in behavior between males and females and fathers and infanticidal males to try to understand what are brain areas involved in those behaviors. The the first question we asked is what are nur thoons drive parental behavior . And in the first set of experiments, we identify a specific set of cells in the hypothalamus that are activated during parental behavior. We then ask all are these neurons required for the parental drive . In a subsequent experiment, we ablaitd these nur nons parental males and parental femaleses. And surprise explg remarkable none of the animals neglectd their infants or attacked them so the experiment suggests these nur rons required for parental behavior. In the next experiment, we ask whether the activity of these neurons was sufficient to drive parental behavior . So this time we took aggressive males and we artificially stimulated these nurturing neurons. Amazingly, this aggressive males stopped attacking the perps and instead they groomed their infants. So what this experiment says is the activity of these nur opposite is sufficient to drive parental care. In another experiment, we identify a set of cells in a different area of the hypothalamus that is activated when aggressive males attack their infants. We call these the parental neflect neurons. In another experiment, we activate these neurons in females and found that these neurons now, these females instead of caring of their infants now neglect or attack them. So what overall these series of experiments suggests is that the brain has two components a set of cells in the hypothalamus that drive parental behavior, and another set of cells that drive parental neglect. We are very exciteed by these results because it opens new opportunity to understand the control of parental behavior and possibly why some animals are animals are parental and some animals are neglecting or attacking the infants. Parental behavior is widely observed among animals, so these also raise the possibility that the function and the regulation of these cells is widely conserved across the animal kingdom. Rose how do you stimulate the neurons to make the aggressive males more nurturing . We use modern methods in neuroscience, called optogenetics to enable to shine lights on neurons that have been genetically modified and have an ion channel that is light activated. In other words we drive the activity of genetically defined population of neurons. Rose thats fascinating. Suzanne, let me talk about how its all evostled, parental behavior. Whats very nice about what catherine has told us is parenting behavior is conserved across animals. Its not just that its conserved. Thats really interested is it also varies. There are similarities between species not very closely related and there are differences between closely related species. And what our work is trying to do is understand the evolutionary basis for some of these parenting behaviors and why is it that you have some parenting that is very similar and some parenting that is very different . As we can see in this video this is a video of a guerilla mother and her infant. There are a lot of similarities in the behavior between how this mother interacts with her babies and how humans interact with their babies. And this is one of the things we really want to understand. What is it that is similar about humans and our caregiving and our parental behavior and other animals . And the biology of mammals females, means that there are hormones that are very, very important in determining lactation, so driving the production of milk and driving the letdown reflex, and these hormones also seem to be very important in regulating the behavior of mothers and their infants. Two of these horr ploans oxytocin and prolactin. At the end of pregnancy, the hypothalamus, which is the same part of the brain that catherine discovered these important parenting neurons, producing a hormone called oxyitosein which is primarily important psychologically in the production of milk and lactation. However, it also is very important in driving maternal behavior. So oxytocin has these secondary impacts on the brain such that when oxytocin levels are raised females bond with their babies. This hormone is incredibly important in driving this motheroffspring relationship. Another hormone thats produced in late pregnancy is prolactin and prolactin is also important in the production of mek but again, it also has these consequences for maternal offspring bonding. And i think thats actually really interesting because we have this biology that allows females to produce milk, but they also are incredibly important in driving the relationship between mothers and their offspring. And these hormones also have been shown to have a lot be very important in driving social bonds in general with other animals. So it seems like one of the basic relationships between two individuals for mammals is the motheroffspring bond but also these hormones are important in the relationship between males and females and also more widely in social relationships. There has been some fascinating work done by teams understanding the evolution of parenting behavior and understanding evolution, especially of parabonding between males and females. In voalz theres a very nice system where some voal species are polygamous, and some are monogamous. Some males and females form longterm pair bonds and both are nurturing toward their young. What has been found in this system is that not only are their higher levels of oxytocin, but in the males, theres a similar hormone thats produced by the hypothalamus vasoppressin which seems to be important in paternal behavior and pair bonding behavior. So we have oxytocin in females that seems to be very important in driving pair bonds and maternal behavior, and in males we have vasoppressin which plays a similar role in driving pair bonds this vaso pressin work was done by they did a fascinating series of experiments determining how oxytocin impacts on female maternal behavior and vasoppressin behavior for male pair bonding and parental behavior. Rose is it monogamy that produces the higher levels of oxytocin, or is it higher levels of oxyitose thane produces monogamy . Oxytocin is primarily involved with the maternal behavior. Its vasoppressin that is associated with monogamy. Some of the same teams who worked on how vasopressin relates to pair bonding bonding and paternal behavior in voals shows you can take voal species that are not monogamous and add vasopress and i know make them monogamous. In a larger context one of the questions that drives our research is understanding what makes humans special . What is it about human biology that is both similar and different to other primates . And one of the things thats very remarkable about humans is we have a very large brain and we have exceptionally long juvenile and infant periods. Because were porn so help will and unable to take care of ourselves, parenting becomes exceptionally important and human babies are pretty much totally defenseless, and even throughout their juvenile period, they really need much more investment by their parents than similar species that are closely related to us. And i think that tells us that in humans particularly, understanding the role of parenting behavior and the biology of parenting behavior is very important. Rose chuck let me turn to what is the effect on children who are deprived of nurturing . We know that children are exposed to a continuum of care. As you can see here, this infant and mother are having a wonderful conversation. You can see the mother is clearly in love with this baby and this is what we want to see in all infants and mothers. Under conditions of profound deprivation, all of that is missing. Here we have a pair of twins interacting, but now we have institutional care and a couple of things to note is the sheer number of babies sitting in the institutions, the lack of caregivers. As you look through here, theres one you can see in the back. You can see theres a very low investment in these children, unlike the video clips we saw in the beginning. And this lack of social interaction we think plays a fundamental role in building the brain. So what we started to observe was in this study, what happens to the developing brain in kids growing up in institutional care . We formed a manipulation in which we saw a large number of children abandoned to institutions in romania and after studying them extensively some of them were placed in very highquality foster care and some remained in the institution. I want to show you a video of what a child at around the age of two looks like. This is on an outing with a bunch of little kids from an institution, and if you notice, the girl who is rolling over, shes 22 months of age. Her i. Q. Is below 50 at this point in time. Shes been in the institution close to the time of birth. Notice the other little girl is rocking and off camera there are three or four other kids rocking and that is very characteristic of kids who grow up in institutions. The question then becomes what happens to the brain . In the next slide im going to show you the beginning of this journey to understand the brain. The first thing we did is record the brains electrical activity e. E. G. , by placing sensors on top of the head. The billions of neurons in the brain generate electrical activity that we can pick up and from that electrical activity we can basically infer the power that the brain is producing, how much electrical activity is there. We can color code that. That indicates more or less powerop on the right side you see an image of a neverinstitutionalized brain. The distribution of electrical activity is portrayed here to reflect much more brain activity in red sitting over the frontal lobe. If you look on the left panel that the institutionalized group. You can see the kids in the institution are underpowered. Instead of a 100 watt light bulb its a 50 watt light bulb. When the children were eight to 10 we performed Magnetic Resonance imaging on them to look at the detailed anatomy of the brain. On the right is an m. R. I. Scan and were showing gray matter. Gray matter represents the cell bodies and appendages of neurons that sit on the cortical surface and do the computations and calculations that the brain does. White matter which ill show you in a moment, really does the communication of the brain. White matter shows up whitish and the gray matter shows up gracish. On the far right you see the amount of dprai matter in the neverinstitutional ides kids. These are the children who grew up in families in bucharest romania. You look at the children institutionalized on the far left its dramatically reduced. They show lesgray matter as do kids we put in foster care and ill come back to that. This is showing us the brain has much lesgray matter by a function of being in institution. We show the same reduction in white matter, the communication pathway. Whats scary about this is it is almost suggesting we know there is a smaller brain as a function of being in an institution the reason this is so important is because before chuck did these studies people knew that deprivation, or lack of parental interaction was bad for the Cognitive Development of the which were. One didnt know to what degree it affect the brain directly. One thought this was likely to be the case but this was the first it evidence that showed dramatic changes occurring in the brain. Rose would it be different if somehow there were some kind of activity with these kids in institutions. In other words, there was much more collegiality in some way produced from outside. In a moment well talk about what happens when you put kids in families. Your question really is can you improve an institution . Charlie asked another question does it have to be a parent . Can there be parental substitutes . We know it has to be the investment the caregivers make. It doesnt have to be the parents but it has to be caregivers who care about that child. And what goes on in institution is you dont have that investment. Rose you have a sense your brain will development if you feel theres some contact, that somebody knows who are you, recognizes you and theres some act of caring affection. I its this social interaction stimulating brain development, and its the lack of interaction. Kids in an institution who got cognitive and linguistic stimulation dut butt no caregiving would be just as poorly off as the kids we see. Now the question is how much recovery is there . In the study we placed half the kid into foster care, really highquality foster care. In the beginning of this video once again well see that little girl when shes 22 months of age, i. Q. Below 50, in an institution. Very atypical motor behavior. Right after this, we put her in foster care, and this is her in foster care eight months later. Her i. Q. Is now in the mid60s. This is her interacting with her foster care mother. Clearly, they have a loving relationship. And this is eight months of foster care. In this clip, shes now about four years of age. Shes now spent half her life in foster care, and look at that interaction shes having. This is the same little girl we saw in the beginning who is crawling backwards, rolling over, had no language, and now her i. Q. In the 80s. There is tremendous recovery that occur by place a child in a family. Placement around the two years of age leads to much Better Outcomes. But placement after two years of age leads to much lesdesirable outcomes. In the next slide we can show the e. E. G. On the right is the brain of the neverinstitutionalized child more red means more activity. In the next slide we see the critical period. Now, the brain this is left institution after age two. Notice it looks identical to the institutionalized brain. The child was in a family but not until they were older than two. In the next slide, you can see the children placed before two have brain activity that looks like just the kids who have never been in an institution. We see this in other do mains as well. What we see is an Inflection Point in development. Removal from an institution and placement into a good family before two leads to much Better Outcomes than children placed after two. Rose timing is everything and if you dont have it it puts a certain sealing on how much you can produce. Its as though the the window of opportunity is reduced. You can see this in simple they put monkeys in a room where they didnt have light for the first year or two. They were blind the rest of their lives. Another experiment looked at what is called binocular interaction. We see with both eyes and it gives us depth perception. And there are cells in the cerebral cortex that respond to input from the twoize ayes. If you close one eye and keep it closed thas lost complete control of the cells in the cerebral cortex. Other eye has taken over and spread. This applies to every sensory system. I think whats so interesting about it as well is how key the social interaction is. If youre thinking thinking about vision, its simple to see how that relates directly to the brain but even richer and even more sensitive. Yes. And it actually in the brain studies which i find so fascinating is we can sort of get an idea of whats going on. I think it also applies to your stuff, cath ren. And that is we know when a child libraries something, when anybody learns anything, the connections between serve cells strengthen. And in the long run you actually see a growth of new synaptic connections. One of the reasons the brain gets big ser because its learning something, it is acquiring new information, it grows new it extension i would presume youre losing connections between youre not learning a darned thing. Absolutely. And youre probably talking about the pair bonding new connection forming. Its interesting also that infants are are not cared well, in turn, are not necessarily good parents. And so its going to be interesting from a neuroscience standpoint to look at the development of the neurons that are involved quality of parenting. What happened if theres bad parenting to the development of the brain . Rose if theres bad parenting they become more likely to be a bad parent. If you remove a pup from the rat, because it doesnt have the benefit of parenting, when that fup pickup grows up, it doesnt take good care of its pups. We see children at 16. We would expect the kids in the Institutional Group when they become parent, which could be the next few years, to be pretty dreadful parent. But the kids we put in foster care early enough have a much greater chance of becoming good parents. Rose so someone is looking at this program at this moment and saying how do i maximize the brain and intellectual development of my child . Is the simple answer engage and show a lot of nurt expurg loving . Enjoy the child and love the child. Rose and what about this whole argument about quality time versus time . So, the position i take on this is i think that parents worry too much. And that they spend time interacting with their babies, and they talk to their babies and they do all the things were biologically programmed to do they dont have to worry. Now, will it give them an i. Q. Of 150 and get them into an Ivy League School . Thats really irrelevant. What we want to do is invest socially and psychologically in our offspring. In fact stress is a problem in driving appropriate parenting behavior. I think were going to hear more from meg. But being too anxious is not a good idea. I just want to make one other point, and that is institutions also zero. Institutions can do a very good job in raising children that are left there. If they have appropriate staff in order to do it. What was wrong in spitzers study, one nurse for seven children is inadequate. Rose to have a consciousness of the ideas were talking about. Exactly. They have to listen to this program. Rose margaret, when the parents are present their ability to nurture may be compromised. Talk about postpartum depression. Sure. Most women will start off the first days after birth with some mood changes. But they usually resolve on their own. But about 10 to 20 of women will have a postpartum depression. We now know people who are at risk, women who are at risk with those with either air personal history of depression, a history of depression associated with child birth, Family History of depression, twin gestation seems to also be a precipitant. And its also worth noting that impoverished women and women with many life circumstances have actually twice the risk of the women i just spoke about. We tend to be very vulnerable after child birth. In fact, women are more vulnerable to psychiatric illness immediately after childbirth than they are at any other time of their life. This was a study done by kendall in edinborough, in which he followed 15,000 women over 12 years. What you will see is he found that there was an increase in psychiatric admissions within the first three months postpartum. And so, a normal diagnosis of postpartum depression requires fourweek onset, but actually, even if it occurs within the first year we do continue to call it postpartum. Now, some postpartum depressions will begin during pregnancy, about 50 of postpartum depression begins during pregnancy. And one other time to be careful of is moms who stop breast feeding. At some point in that year or so or two years ive had women come in to my office who manifested major depressive symptoms immediately after stopping their lactation. So the clinical manifestations actually of women who come in, theyre profoundly sad and have terrible anxiety. They feel overwhelmed at every task. And theyre usually unable to sleep. But even unable to sleep when the baby sleeps so thats unusual. What is unfortunate is they feel that they cannot connect with the baby. They feel numb. And they feel terribly guilty about this. And usually label themselves bad mothers. Rose connect to means what . Bonding with the baby. They dont feel at all atasmed to the baby. Rose desire . Desire theyre not interested in interacting with the baby and it makes them feel awful. Now, suicide can be a real concern at this time in mothers who are seriously depressed. And theres another symptom that will happen will occur in a few women who have postpartum depression. And these have these obsessional ruminations, all day long, that they might hurt their baby. And they become intolerable. And theyre really tortured. So these are not women who want to kill their baby. These are women who are having anxious ruminations that are very distressing. Now, having said that i just want to quickly discuss postpartum psychosis because postpartum psychosis is very different from postpartum depression. Its actually a very rare disorder. It occurs in maybe one in 1,000 deliveries, although its more prevalent in women who have bipolar disorder. These women need to be hospitalized immediately. We consider it a psychiatric emergency because the mom does have to be separated from her baby, both for her own safety and for her infants safety. Because theyve lost contact with reality. And they may have hallucinations or hallucinations or another psychotic thought which may excel them to kill their compel them to kill ther babies. Thats one of the saddest circumstances. Speaking of the adverse effects that occur in children upon postpartum depressed women these babies tend to have insecure attachment because these moms cannot attend to the infants cues. They cant tend to their emotional needs. They also have some Cognitive Impairment because of the parental failure to encourage interest in the environment or curiosity. And often they will have behavioral problems as well because of the parents own irritability or hostility during the parenting time. So we wonder what actually causes this. Over the course of pregnancy, as you can see in this slide, there are hormones specifically estrogen and progesterone which increase slowly over 40 weeks of pregnancy. At the time of delivery, there is a precipitous fall within 24 hours, which is kind of a shock to the system. Wow. And these it hormones, estrogen and progesterone, feed back on to the hypothalamus which is the emotional part of the brain. There are some women who are exquisitely sensitive to hormones and hormones changes during their lifetime. A most important component of parental caregiving, of course, is responsiveness to an infant. This is how a mom reacts with her baby. She speaks to her baby. The paeb has emotional needs. Theres a kind of mutual emergency dance that goes on between them. But when a mom is depressed what she says is she cant attach to her baby. She cant respond to the babys needs or the babys coouz or the babys smiles. Rose i want to get david involved in this. So whats the percentage of men that have postpartum depression . Very underrecognized and very unresearched. Probably at this point 5 to 10 of them. Rose tell me about your experiences, david. Thank you charlie. I really appreciate the opportunity. I first just wanted to say that the stigma of Mental Illness is something that i see every day as a pediatrician, and i can say that not being able to talk about something whether it is Mental Illness or any illness if you cant get treatment, you cant get help. And i think that that stigma was real for me, and i think it did delay me seeking treatment. At least in my opinion, in america, a man is associated with several things, but weakness and helplessness are not generally considered to be masculine behaviors. But that was what i experienced. And when i was going through my postpartum issues with my wife, i would always say to her i worry that by telling you this, youll think lesof me, that it will affect your perception of me because im supposed to be the strong husband and here i am cowed by tell us what you were feeling. So i what ended up happening hit me completely off guard. I was very excited to have the child. I was very happy when i found out we were having a boy. And i suffered no symptoms during the end at any time during my wifes pregnancy. The first week of life, everything was fine. I was at work during that time, but i had taken weeks two and three off to spend time at home. My wife was on Maternity Leave as well. And thats when my feelings started to change. I think in retrospect, my sadness came out as more frustration and anger. I felt rejected. I felt faz my son was rejecting me. He was a very difficult child to calm down. He cried a lot. Even if he was well fed and changed, he just didnt soothe very easily. And i think i just viewed that very differently than my wife did. My wife connected to him and was nurturing and there were times i just did not want to be around him. In fact, there was one instance where i was so angry and so frustrated that i just had to leave the apartment and walk outside because i couldnt be around him. I didnt seek any help at that point because i was going back to work, and i figured things would just get better. But, of course they didnt. And i would come home from work and my wife would hand my son to me he would just start crying and id hand him right back. And id say i do not want to hold him. And i would start to denigrate him. I would say very mean things about my son and this would upset my wife as much for what i was saying as to how i was feeling. It was during this time, as meg point out i started to have some images in my head that were not pervasive but they were there. And, unfortunately, they did involve me harming my son and then harming my wife and then harming myself. It was at this point they realized you needed help. I needed some help. I spoke to my physician, and he had given me zoloft, i took maybe four doses and i didnt take any more. I think i wasnt prepared to take medicine for Something Like this. I had been in therapy for some mild anxiety before so i was comfortable with that, and the practice i work at has Behavioral Health and i found one person who does specifically postpartum dwe pregz. But i didnt make the phone call. I think maybe there was just a part of me that thought this would just get better but of course, it didnt get better. At around week five, six i probably said something particularly heinous that morning, and i left for work, and i called my wife to apologize and to make sure we were still on for that weekend where one of the grandparents was going to come and watch my son and go and run some errand and maybe get lurch. And i thought i heard her say no. And i just lost it. I started crying ask balling my eyes out. I thought finally all these things i was thinking and all these things i was saying had finally come back and and it was going to sever my bond with my wife which i needed so much at that point. Of course, that is not what she said. She got upset and she said you really need to you need some help. I said at that moment we need a night nurse to help us with some sleep and get some rest. I got to work and i called one of my good friends who had two daughters and told him some of what i was experiencing and he told me that it was not unusual and i should make some phone calls. And that day i called the therapist, and by the next week i was seeing somebody who i ended up seeing for about three months. So the night nurse had started. I was starting my cognitive behavioral therapy. And one of the things they went over was as eric said, these feelings are not theyre thoughts. Theyre not actions. And i shouldnt feel bad that i felt this way. I just had to see them for what they were, which were these negative thoughts that were not based on reality. My son was not rejecting me. He wasnt ill in some way. He was seeing the doctor. He was growing. There was nothing to back up what i was thinking and i had to do a lot of homework to kind of help myself through that. By the time he was about three months, i was going to take a month off. My wife was going to go back to work and i was going to take month and up until that point it was looking really dicey because we were really nervous how i would react. But thankfully through the therapy and him just maturing and getting better, like babies do, we ended up having a great month. I finally felt like a parent. I changed all the diapers, i fed him. I felt like i gained so much from that time. I have an amazing son. He is 18 months old. He is just an awesome kid and i have a great wife and he loves you. He does. He does. I believe that. And thinking back to what i felt back then, it was another period in my life it was another person that was experiencing that. And i do hope that if as i realized, i did not know eye looked online for information, and there just isnt very much on parental postpartum depression and i didnt know what rates there were and i never had anybody to talk to me about it. I knew about the female part but i never knew about the male part that hopefully if somebody does see this and understands what theyre going through is not unique, that they can get help and hopefully dont have to suffer. Rose let me see what Everybody Knows in this room and everybody watching you, one, there is an admiration for coming to share your story and because you share your story i am sure it will benefit someone else. Thats first. The second thing, i wonder if in fact and its so much easier to say if youd reached out from the very beginning when you felt this, at that time you didnt realize it was a problem. You realized it was a feeling to someone to give you more context and say your son is not rejecting you. Hes being a baby. That would have made a difference. I think so. And when the time comes that we have another child i will likely be very proactive with and i probably will start seeing someone ahead of time just to be on the safe side. Im assuming having gone true it once i will be better able it will be more predictable to me, ill understand it better. But just to be on the safe side because i never want to have those feelings again i will be talking to someone and make sure if they do pop up i already have somebody i can talk to. I think one of the things we talked about before and one of the ground rules of psychotherapy is you can think anything. That is, youre allowed to entertain any idea you want in your head. Thats not action. So that alone makes one more comfortable, knowing that this is not a terrible thing. Thinking is your privilege. Rose so lets have a conversation here. This is fascinating. Everything that has been said here is fascinating to me, every aspect of this, and im not a parent so to appreciate this im a godparent, and i see lots of kids. I come away from this with a greater understanding of the absolute significance in the first two years of a babys life for there to be some kind of remarkable kind this may be fundamental and understood by mothers around the world no. Rose but its not. No. Rose how essential this is to what we now know about the biology of the brain and what happens to neurons when there is. And so lets talk a bit more about other place wheres children of no fault of their own end up perhaps by tragedy perhaps by something else, end up in a foster home. What are implications of that . Are rules the same . Weve just got to figure out a way to find, to connect to a child with love and nurture and companionship. Right. I think its a little bit more complicated in foster care, for example, in the u. S. , simply because what leads a child to go into foster care can be complicated. It can be maltreatment. It can be neglect. It can be any number of awful things. And i think the worst things we do in foster care is have repeated foster care placements where kids go from one home to another. The sooner theyre taken out of a bad environment and put boa good one the better off theyll be. The second thing youre raising is much more difficult, the issue of adult plasticity. You have a child who had an awful few years of life and now theyre five or 10 years of age and showing all kinds of behavior and emotion problems, what can we do . I think the storyline is it is going to require more effort and more resource in some ways to get that child back on an even keel. Its not impossible, but having gone through this critical period the parent needs to understand its going to take more than if the child had been placed earlier. I think thats another frontier of neuroscience, rescue these critical periods and in so doing take a fiveyearold or 10yearold or 15yearold and get them back to where they should be. Rose do we have a lot of research on that . We have growing research on that. A colleague of ours has been doing brilliant work on how to rescue a critical period in an adult animal. Sometimes its pharmacological but sometimes behavior. When you go back to children born with a vision problem their eyes wander and they cant focus. Theres treatment, if you rear them in the dark for a while you can treat adult stare, abismus. Thats remarkable but we cant do that in humans. What is really important is foster parents nonparents can be as nurturing as the biological parents. And this has been shown in human. It has been shown in animals as well. For example, in rats, nonparent males and females will reject the perps, will avoid them. But if you expose the animals to pups several days in a role, they will nurture the pups, build a nest, and groom the pups they will be parents. So these suggest that the brain areas that drive parental behavior can be activated both in parents and in nonparents. So thats extremely important. Thats really important. I think the biology is becoming so interesting. We can tell when a woman has postpartum depression how she respond to the child compared to a normal parent. At a very early age and i think the opposing brain region nghtz hypothalamus are so fascinating in terms of the aggression that anderson described and your findings on parenting. Rose is there some point where nurturing reaches a diminishing level of participation . I think there is a point of diminishing returns. Its not lirn. Its not the more caregiving you give the better the outcome. I think the point as a species we have come to expect certain things and then it plateaus which should take some of the pressure off parents to be a perfect parent. I think its important to think about how humans evolved and what we traditionally did. The Nuclear Family is quite recent. It comes back to catherine saying nonparents provide parental care. There are a lot of different ways we can raise children with different kinds of support and different kinds of investment, and it doesnt all have to be just from the parent. So i think it i think we kind of get stuck into moms have to bring kids up. But villages bring kids up, and its i think its really important to think about this nurturing can come from outside the family. Many people describe how important the extended family is. Interacting with grandparents or cousins and things like that. You can see important that might be. If you look at traditional societies, it isnt always the family. Theres a risk of people thinking i dont have an extended family network. My child is going to suffer. Neighbors, friends neighbors, Friends Child Care nursery, highquality care can come from different places. Rose i know fathers who have said to me i really couldnt connect or identify with my child below two years old. Once he got to be three four, five whatever it was much better. But in the first two years i just it would seem to me were making the case here that you shouldnt feel bad about yourself but what shudo is understand the principle here that nurturing is good, and if you cant do it thats right. Thats right. Rose figure out a way it can be done. Excellent point. Thats a really good point. I think what were describe describing is somebody needs to make an investment in the child. Rose it doesnt have to be the biological parent. I think its more recent, parents have a baby and they hand the baby to them and said go home and they were by themes. Even my parents, my grandparents were nearby. So there were more people there. So someone could get rest. Someone could attend to themselves and now we just kind of we kick them out of the hospital much faster, and suddenly its like here gu. And i know that when i see parents before theyve had their babies i used to have a very different discussion before i had a child and now after and i always ask do you have a network . Do you have people around . Its so important i think as you said, theres a lot of anxiety. And i think sometimes a mom just needs to hear, its not bad if you dont want to be with them 100 of the time. Its okay to go have lunch with somebody or just go for a run and leave the child with a friend, a neighbor or a Family Member and attend to yourself. Its not a bad thing. But i think weve made it so that the mother mush able to do everything and anything and its not what biology says they can do. I think the point that emerges from your presence here its okay to have postpartum depression. This is as long as you recognize it. As long as you recognize it. And do something about it. Rose and get some help. As we close this out im struck one more time about how scientists have made observational studies looking in romania, wherever the particular saturday were done, the prison experience with mothers who gave quality time even though limited, versus foster, other kinds of institutions. These were observational experiments. Now we can look at the neurons. It shows you were just beginning to get the biology and how often the biology connects with the observation. Right. Absolutely. Which is an amazing thing. Rose what are we doing next time . Were doing the biology of gender identity. How brain encodes the difference between sexes and how does it handle Transgender Identity . So really its a continuation of this further dealing with, you know, development of the individual. This time with Sexual Identity and changes in Sexual Identity. Rose i thank thank all of you. Its a pleasure to have you at this table and to help us understand this essential and remarkable thing called parenting. So thank you very much. Happyand well see you next time. Thank you for joining us. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org this is nightly business with Tyler Mathisen and sue herera. Shaky start. The shortened week beginsh a tripledigit decline on the dow and some are wondering some the summer months will bring more of the same. Cable consolidation. Charter swoops in and buys time warner for 55 brls creating a pourer house in the fast changi industry. Hacked. The irs is hit by a cyber attack and data accessed by people who want to steal your identity. All of that and more for on nightly busin for tuesday, may 26th. Good evening. Investors return to a selloff. Stocks stumble on up beat economic data