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In this video, Darby Saxbe, PhD, professor and director of clinical training at the department of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, discusses emerging research on how the brains of parents change when caring for their infant.

The following is a transcript of her remarks:

There's a lot of evidence that having more time with young kids is beneficial to all kinds of parents, not necessarily biological birth parents. A lot of the work has , specifically. Fathers who take longer leaves see benefits to their marriages, see benefits to their ability to bond with their young children. In some studies, those benefits actually seemed to , so they extend a decade or more.

My lab did a study where we looked at dads who , and we found that they had benefits in terms of their sleep. We also found that their partners had benefits in terms of their depression and their stress. So paternity leave isn't just good for individual dads, it can actually be good for partners and for kids, because it's just more resources, having more people at home to help take part in the work of caring for a young child.

And we see that in other countries there are actually incentive programs designed to encourage men to take more paternity leave or take longer leaves. In Scandinavia for example, there are nudge programs where the couple gets a certain amount of leave, but some of it is earmarked for the father, so that if they don't take that leave, that leave just goes away.

We don't really have anything like that in the United States, but programs like that exist because of evidence that there are health and well-being benefits to fathers, children, and partners when men are able to take leave to stay home with a young child.

There's this really new, small, emerging research literature looking at how parenthood changes the brain. Most of that work has focused on mothers and has looked from preconception or from pregnancy into the postpartum period. We see changes in parts of the brain that are linked with mentalizing, social cognition, thinking about other people's minds, and we see those changes are so pronounced that even a machine learning algorithm can look at the brains of mothers and non-mothers and figure out which women have recently become parents. So we see these widespread changes across the whole brain in moms.

In dads -- has been looking at this in collaboration with some other labs -- we see some changes as well, but they're much more variable and they're less pronounced and less striking than the changes that we see in moms. But what's exciting is that they're in the same parts of the brain. So it suggests that there are some universal things that change about the brain when people become parents. And in looking at that variability, why it is that some fathers have more brain change than other fathers, one variable that seems to be really important is time spent caring for the new infant. It may be that that's the secret sauce to changing the brain in a way that sets up parents to be more sensitive caregivers.

If we're able to replicate this work and find that time with infant is a really important determinant of perinatal changes to the brain, then it suggests that on a policy level we really need to be thinking about how to protect time with infants in the first months. Not just because it's in the interest of babies to have attentive caregivers, but because the transformative experience for parents is one that we want to scaffold and facilitate.

So if folks are transitioning to parenthood and don't have the resources to stay home and invest in time to care for their children, they may not benefit as much neurobiologically from some of the shifts that we know help to facilitate good care.

This is an area where I really think there is a lot of room for investigating some of these really interesting questions about what changes across the transition to parenthood, but I also think we need to think about policy more holistically. We have this very individualistic ethic in the United States where we think if you choose to have a child, it's your job to figure out how to have time and money to take care of that child.

We really need to think about the fact that every child that's born in the United States is contributing to a larger public good, and the more that we invest in the welfare of those children, the more we benefit as a society, economically, our workforce, and our national security.

Our birth rate has been dropping in the United States over the last few decades, and part of that is because we don't really do enough to support what parents need. So I think when we're thinking about policy, we need to be thinking about health, we need to be thinking about the brain, we need to be thinking about our biology.

Policy isn't just about dollars and cents, it's about what we do to protect our human well-being.

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