Baby’s smiles and brain research

Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 2:13 pm (babies, science)

I’m having a grand ole’ time working hard for the company that husband and I own, but I miss being immersed in science on a daily basis.  My particular passions are math and chemistry – as they have been since high school!  So one thing I’ve been doing to make sure I get my dose of science is to add the Scientific American, Wired, and Science Magazine homepages to my firefox homepage tabs.  The Science Magazine one I linked up through my school’s library, so that I have full access, which is something I get to keep as an alumni – yay!

Anyhow, today I read this article on baby’s smiles and the mother-infant bond.  It was an interesting article about a study in which the researchers studied first-time mothers’ response to pictures of their 7-month old babies.  The moms had not seen the pictures before, and the researchers showed them to them while monitoring their brain response with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.  They found that the baby’s smiles triggered a strong response in the reward centers of the brain, and used this to theorize that the baby’s smile acts as a strong reward.  While I respect their efforts to study the brain with the scientific method, I can’t help but think “well, duh.”

I am curious about different questions.  Sure, none of us are surprised to hear that an infant’s smile is a reward for mom.  But how are the brain responses different in dad?  What about primary caretaker dads (like SAHDs) versus fathers who leave most of the baby raising to mom?  What about nannies that spend more time with the baby than mom?  Those are, to me, more interesting questions.

I feel a strong connection to the babies I care for, which grows in intensity usually based on how often I care for the baby and how long I’ve been working with that family.  In my own experiences, there have even been times when, spending 20 hours a week with the baby and observing his interactions with his mom as well, I’ve felt there were certain signals that I could read better than baby’s mom.

I would definitely be interested to see research not just on different parts of mom’s brain responses but also comparing this to brain responses in dad and other caretakers.  While I have no doubt that the mother-baby bond can be exceedingly strong, I think sometimes society assumes that only the mother can understand the baby that way, and implies that all mothers should.  Really though, in today’s society, families all do it differently, and those old assumptions don’t make much sense anymore.

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Good News

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 12:42 am (Yawns, babies)

Jenny F. Scientist shared some exciting news the other day, so if you haven’t yet, go on over and congratulate her!

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My, how the time has passed

Monday, July 21, 2008 at 4:54 pm (Entrepreneurship, about me, babies, gaming, geek!, politics, science)
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Just thought I’d post a little something to say “I’m still here!” …I’m working on a post about the recent John Tierney column in the NYTimes on women in science, and I hope to have it up soon. In the meantime, I wanted to comment on the New Yorker cover with Barack and Michelle Obama – it seems to have upset many people. I’m not really sure what everyone is so bothered about – I thought it was funny.

So…time’s been passing – and I’ve been working. Playing with liquid nitrogen, teaching 10th graders about chemistry (with squishy and mushy materials like silly putty and home-made viscoelastic slime and personal care products like shampoo, hair gel, and lotion), occasionally analyzing nuggets of data, reading about things going on in the comics industry (T! relates to it), and talking and learning about business. I’ve found all of this to be on the whole enjoyable work, and that makes me happy. :-)

Meanwhile, it’s been unbelievably hot in NYC! So hot, in fact, that the living room is regularly 92 degrees after having left the AC off over night, and during the day while the AC is working at full capacity it maybe brings the room down to 85. Yummy. Sticky. Unfun.

But it’s not all work…on Friday night I had the extreme pleasure of watching one of my oldest and best friends play Musetta in the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music’s Summer Opera production of La Boheme. In the second act, the character Musetta gets to control the stage, and my did she! She was amazing, and I got chills. Especially notable since we were in an AC-free high school auditorium that must have been a sweltering 90 something degrees. We all felt for the characters in the winter scenes with coats, sweatshirts, and scarves on!

I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft with my husband. For hours. Giliane and Argore ready to bomb demons

Partially because it’s fun, and partially because it’s the only entertainment that fits in our budget right now (at the amount of hours we play, it’s less than $1/hour of entertainment). And taking walks with the hubby! To get outside! Where there’s air, and exercise to be had!

And finally, I’ve been thinking about babies. Cute, cuddly, babies. Can’t wait for the family I’ve been working for with the 4 month old to get back from Israel so I can go play with him again!

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Birthing, American style

Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 1:35 am (babies, feminism)

I recently watched The Business of Being Born, a documentary I got from Netflix. This was very interesting not just in an “I love anything related to babies” way but also in a feminist way. Despite my initial skepticism of the gravity of anything produced by Ricki Lake, I found the documentary worth watching. It contained some great information about birthing practices in the US.

One part that did strike a cord with me is that I have pretty much been afraid of giving birth, of being in labor, for my entire life, and apparently I’m not alone. I’m realizing this is largely because of the way that birth is portrayed in the movies and on tv. For me, I also never heard glowing birth stories from my mom – it sounded much more like an unfun experience that resulted in a very worthwhile outcome – a baby. My mother has two children (my older brother and me), and both were born via c-section. I might feel differently about it if the adult women around me had described births as “beautiful,” which is how the mom I now babysit for describes the home birth of her son earlier this year – and with feeling, like she really treasures the experience.

The film showed many powerful images of births in America both a century ago and now. On the one hand, the film showed modern women who gave birth at home, with the assistance of a midwife and their spouses and children, all of whom were close yet comfortable. On the other hand, the film showed doctors who appeared primarily concerned with getting the patients in and out of the hospital in a timely manner, and whose patients appeared, on-film, to be powerless to stop not just pain medications but also labor inducing medications, which have been shown to lead to a higher number of c-sections. At the home births, the moms looked like they were in lots of pain, but that they had support and the comfort of choosing what position to be in and possibly in a tub if they choose. At the hospital births, many of the moms looked both worn-out and uncomfortable, laying on their backs in a skimpy hospital gown. It certainly wasn’t hard to watch the mothers and know which situation seemed like a more comfortable, loving, bonding experience for the birth of a child, although I was left wondering more about birthing centers, which seem like they might be the best of both worlds.

The Huffington Post featured a recent article on the AMA’s response to the documentary:

Ladies, the physicians of America have issued their decree: they don’t want you having your babies at home with midwives.

We can’t imagine why not. Study upon study have shown that planning a home birth with a trained midwife is a great choice if you want to avoid unnecessary medical intervention. Midwives are experts in supporting the physiological birth process: monitoring you and your baby during labor, helping you into positions that help labor progress, protecting your pelvic parts from damage while you push, and “catching” the baby from the position that’s most effective and comfortable for you — hands and knees, squatting, even standing — not the position most comfortable for her.

When healthy women are supported this way, 95% give birth vaginally, with hardly any intervention.

And yet, the American Medical Association doesn’t see the point.

Although I can easily imagine wanting an epidural or some type of painkiller, I wouldn’t want an episiotomy, inducing drug like pitocin, or a c-section unless it was medically necessary. Unfortunately, even just taking an epidural can make you more likely to need any/all of those three. And the c-section and episiotomy both feature weeks to months of recovery which can inhibit your opportunities for baby bonding and for sexual relations with your husband. (Months of sex being painful while the episiotomy heals? No thanks!)

And the information suggests that for women with a low-risk pregnancy, they’ll have a lower incidence of these procedures being performed if they birth at home with a midwife. A study published in 2005 concludes:

Planned home birth for low risk women in North America using certified professional midwives was associated with lower rates of medical intervention but similar intrapartum and neonatal mortality to that of low risk hospital births in the United States.

And then there’s this part, from the blog by the author of the book Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care:

Pitocin, given to more than half of women during labor, is the synthetic preparation of the hormone oxytocin, the driving force of labor that causes the uterus to contract. You know the soft side of oxytocin already: it floods your body during orgasm, when you fall in love, when you get close to a friend, even when you sit down to a shared meal. It is the hormone of connection, closeness — love. And when women give birth, they get the biggest helping of oxytocin that humans ever experience. A “love high,” if you will.

Pitocin replicates oxytocin’s muscle, producing strong uterine contractions, but it does not pass to the brain. You don’t get the warm and fuzzies with the pharmaceutical version. Furthermore, it shuts down your body’s own oxytocin production. That means that when you get Pitocin in your IV — whether you’re being induced or just “augmented” — you’re missing out on the natural oxy-rush.

If any woman is going to go through labor, it certainly sounds like it’d be a lot more enjoyable of an experience with the natural oxytocin rushing through your body and priming you to bond with your baby. Seriously. The most oxytocin humans ever experience? Where do I sign up?!

So, for the moms among my readers – what kind of birth did you have, and how do you feel about the experience?

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Shared Parenting

Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 10:43 pm (about me, babies, parenting)
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There’s a detailed article on shared parenting from NYTimes Magazine that I’m reading, and I’m so happy just to see it. It describes people, most older than myself, who are living lives in the way that I’ve been planning and hoping to live mine. This includes both equal parenting and the voluntary cutback of work hours, work responsibilities, and of course income in order to spend more time living your life and enjoying your family or whatever is most important to you.

Some stats on how the numbers still stack up on average:

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

As disappointing as these numbers are, particularly for families where both partners work full-time, the families described in the article so far are encouraging. I do find it interesting, though, that the author chose to talk about these parent’s own backgrounds – where they grew up and what their parents did – because it signals to me that the author felt these people’s choices needed to be explained. I guess it should be natural when talking about how one manages their family, to ask how their family was managed when they were children, so maybe I’m just being paranoid about the “otherness” of couples who choose to share parenting equally.

I can’t read the rest of the article, and I entreat my readers to go and read it and then tell me what they think. How do you plan or hope to share parenting duties? If you have children already, is reality living up to the plan?

p.s. here’s a great and amusing excerpt for my academic and medical friends:

She goes on to suggest that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.”

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Settling in to the summer

Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 12:43 am (Entrepreneurship, University and depression, about me, babies, depression, financial woes, health)

The last few weeks have seen an interesting hodgepodge of demands on my time, but I think I’ve managed to secure enough babysitting hours to stabilize the financial situation a little bit until we get our next cash influx, which should be a few weeks away now. Financially we’re in what Husband is calling a “famine cycle,” but I think I’ve succeeded in keeping it from getting as bad as it has been in the past. I pulled in all the cash from any savings account we had, enough to bring our bank account in the black again, and now I can put enough cash from babysitting into the account to keep from bank fees and bounced payments when some of our unavoidable bills are processed. This feels a little better, although it’s still really stressful as a significant portion of our bills are going unpaid, and thus our debt is just growing further.

I found a new occasional baby sitting gig, watching a 2 month old. I’m happy to be around a baby again, as the toddlers at my other gig are now 20 months and 3 1/4 yrs old. And so far, the baby seems to be a pretty easy baby, although I haven’t spent too much time with him yet. His parents are both musicians, and I’m going to be helping out while his momma gets some practice time in. So I get to listen to some great classical piano while I’m working, too! It’s pretty soothing. So far the baby and I seem to interact well – he likes my smile and my laugh.

So this is what my weekly schedule is shaping up to look like: 5-10 hours with the 2 month old, 10-15 hours with the toddlers, unknown number of hours in the lab (I’m a “part-time staff associate” for the summer), and 10-20 hours on the startup company. I’ve been taking time off from lab work the past few weeks to focus on helping to get the business pitch ready for our next attempts to secure funding, but I begin lab stuff again this week. We have some new summer undergrads who I will be meeting on Thursday and begin training on Friday. I’m looking forward to new potential mentees!

As for my mental and physical health, I’m struggling, but fighting hard. I’ve been a revolving door of various infections, viruses, and other stress-related sickness. I feel the pull of the bed, with the comfy covers and the promise of sleep and dreams, but I’m managing somewhat to get myself to do work. Last week I felt myself wanting to sleep an awful lot, but on Thursday I fought hard against the desire to stay in bed, and it was a good step. I went out and ran some errands in the neighborhood and then went to Starbucks and did some work there, and by the time I returned home I felt somewhat rejuvenated. When I get stressed out too much, I try to meditate and relax. When I feel like sleeping but know that I’ve had enough sleep, I try to get out and just do little things to get myself going. It’s these small skills that I’ve been cultivating to fight depression, and I’m definitely getting better at it. These struggles with depression and anxiety haven’t been easy, but I am definitely able to see progress in my ability to deal with everything and to fight my way out of the depressed state. I know that I’m dealing with everything that’s going on now in a much, much stronger way than I would have even two years ago, and for that I’m proud.

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Greater calorie intake increases chances of conceiving sons

Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 4:04 pm (babies, gender, health)

I came across this article from ScienceNOW about a new study on whether the mom’s calorie intake at the time of conception affects the gender of the baby. The idea that it might is based on the Trivers-Willard hypothesis:

In 1973, biologist Robert Trivers and mathematician Dan Willard predicted that to maximize the number of her descendents, a mother should have some control over the sex of her offspring. If she’s healthy and has plenty of food, male offspring are her best investment because they can produce more progeny than can females. But a mediocre male cannot, so mothers with limited resources are better off having girls.

The study, You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans, was done in the UK by Fiona Mathews, Paul J. Johnson, and Andrew Neil. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get access to the full text, so all I had to go by was the abstract and the article from ScienceNOW, but it sounds interesting. Mathews and her colleagues proposed that if the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is true for human mothers, a mother with greater total calorie intake might have more male babies.

The researchers looked at what the first-time mothers were eating at the time of conception. They found that of the mothers who consumed a total amount of calories in the top 1/3 of the subject pool, 56% had sons. In the lowest calorie group, 45% had sons. Male births are in a “small but detectable decline” in some industrialized countries- since 1970 the proportion of male births in the US has gone down by .1% – and now researchers have evidence that maternal diet may be one of the factors involved. There are likely other factors as well, such as environmental contaminants.

One of the interesting parts of the study is that it found a slightly stronger correlation between how much cereal the mother eats at the time of conception and the gender of the baby. Only 43% of mothers who ate less than one bowl of cereal per week had sons, while 59% of mothers who ate at least one bowl of cereal each day bore sons. From the ScienceNOW article:

With fewer women eating breakfast, Mathews says that the Trivers-Willard effect could be at least part of the explanation for dropping sex ratios. Breakfast may be particularly important for maintaining blood sugar levels, which have been linked to increased production of males in other mammals, although the precise mechanism is unknown (ScienceNOW, 30 November 2007).

I really wish I could read the actual article, because I’m particularly curious about this part. I eat lots of cereal – but rarely for breakfast. Rather, I munch on staples like cheerios for snack food at any time of day. The ScienceNOW article continually makes the jump from cereal to breakfast, and I want to know the details from the actual article. Did they ask whether they ate the cereal at breakfast time? If the effect is really about blood sugar levels, then the question of whether they ate breakfast may be more important than how much cereal they eat. And what about women who eat breakfast, keep steady blood sugar levels, but also keep a low overall calorie intake? Where did they fall?

Finally, I also take issue with the title of the ScienceNOW article, “Want a Boy? Eat your Wheaties.” While I understand that it is easier to stick to either X% have boys or X% have girls, I had a bit of a visceral reaction to the “Want a boy?” part of the title, because while I know I’ll be ecstatic and loving with my children no matter their gender, I’ve always daydreamed most often about a baby girl.

While an article title must provide a hook to get the potential reader to go read it, this title seems to me to really simplify the findings. Maybe something like “Want to choose your baby’s sex? Modify your diet.” would have gone down smoother but still hooked people. It seems like it would be easy for an average person to read the actual title and either think “That must be crap science” (this admittedly crossed my mind) or “I’m going to go eat Wheaties every day now.” In reality, from what I can gather with just the abstract and the ScienceNOW article, eating breakfast and/or cereal every day may increase your chance of conceiving a son to 59%. That is a significant increase, but the 41% of mothers who follow that and have girls is no small number of moms. And if I want to have a girl, should I start skipping breakfast and avoiding cheerios? That sure would seem foolish going into a pregnancy.

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Babies of high BMI mothers have more fat and less muscle

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 at 10:53 pm (babies, pre-conception planning, weight loss)

I came across this article today, which I wanted to briefly share. Yet more reason for me to get healthier before we start trying to get pregnant! I am making good progress and so is Husband, so we’re on the right track. Since we joined Traineo (a year ago), I’ve lost 12 pounds and he’s lost 27 pounds! Over a whole year 12pounds may not sound like a lot, but it’s been very easy and sustainable and because of that I’m confident that I can keep it off and continue to lose more!

Anyhow, here’s an excerpt from Reuters’ reporting of the study:

However, infants of the 39 overweight or obese moms had significantly higher percentages of body fat (13.6 vs. 12.5 percent), higher fat mass (448.3 grams vs. 414.1 grams), and lower fat-free mass (3,162.2 grams vs. 3,310.5 grams) than the babies born to the 33 normal-weight women, Fields and his team found.

…

Gauging babies’ body composition at birth could provide a clearer picture of their health than weight alone, Fields added, but then the question remains as to what should be done if babies are found to have a high percentage of body fat. One possibility, Fields said, would be to encourage their mothers to breastfeed. His own research has demonstrated that formula-fed babies tend to be fatter.

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Random bullets

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 at 8:37 pm (about me, academia, babies, baby fever, depression, financial woes, grad school, marriage)

  • I am having a very negative day inside my head.  It is one of those days where the tasks of being an adult and taking care of oneself and a small household of two adults seem overwhelming.  One of those days in which I think, godD*MN, there are just too many things to be done!
  • It goes something like this.  Flicka Mawa lists off stressors in her head, and then feels tense and irritated.  Flicka Mawa thinks of Husband, and how he would tell her not to give in to those feelings, and wills her brain to busy itself with other topics, mostly through meditation.  Thoughts turn to stuff like: “It will get better. It will not always be like this.  Focus on your breathing. Let the calm flow through you…” you get the idea, right?
  • Shortly, Flicka Mawa’s brain distracts itself with thoughts of impending doom and lists of things to do or things to be upset about.  Flicka Mawa either 1)gives in and sheds a few tears while she cuddles in a blanket and tries not to disturb Husband who is very busy prepping for his first business pitch to his older brother tonight, or 2)manages to be strong for some period of time, meditating and willing self not to dwell on the negative thoughts.  Switching between 1 and 2 ensues for the remainder of the day.
  • Primary reason for today’s stressing? The sudden realization that in the past 2 days our bank account went from low to -$500, and all of a sudden that $1k check that Husband FINALLY got his freelance boss to send is going to be cut in half before we even see it.  This is the bank accounts first dip into negativity since, oh, February of this year.  It has probably spent more than 30 days in the past 6 months in such a state.
  • I am getting kind of sick of it.  But I know it’s almost over, Husband and I have agreed and things really ARE going stellar for him right now, but it’s just, well…I just DON’T want to deal with this right now.  I have $5 in my purse, he might have up to $10 in his, and among things like having to pack something for lunch and dinner tomorrow from the limited food we have here, this also means that I can’t even afford to buy your basic over the counter medication for the d*mn yeast infection I seem to have gotten…
  • The yeast infection is probably from all that sex I’ve been having.  At least this is a positive point in my list of random bullets.
  • This morning’s realization led to another one – tax day is less than a week away, and now we don’t even have enough funds to pay someone to help us file, let alone to pay anything that we might owe.  And they’re going to be uber-complicated this year, because neither of us got W-2’s, I got paid via outside stipend for part of the year and internal university stipend for part of the year, and of course cash for my babysitting, but then husband, his is more complicated, as he had no full-time job all year – just a few of those MISC forms for some freelance work, and some cash investments in the company that went towards paying for Husband’s time as he worked on it.  Then there were some company expenses paid for out of our own accounts, and he works at home so we have can factor in home office costs.  All this leads to the taxes being much more complicated than last year and likely taking 10 times more time to do than either of us has to give in the next 3 weeks.
  • And my Dad is about to drive past our corner of the world as he moves from my childhood homestate of MA to Myrtle Beach, SC.  He wishes to visit and take us to dinner and see us before he moves further away (SC) than he is now (MA).  But the best part is he’s planning to pass by in 2 weeks and my quals are in 2.5 weeks which means he should be planning to move a few days before the quals.  Now, if visits with my dad were all fun and no stress, I’d definitely say I’d make a way for it to work, but it’s not like that.
  • I think that’s enough random bullets of consciousness (Is that what RBOC stands for when I see it on blogs?). I’m going to go watch some CSI:NY.
  • Speaking of CSI:NY, at times like these, I find myself thinking of all the myriad of things I could go and do with the training I have up to this point at time.  One of the things I think about sometimes is forensic science.  I love solving mysteries, and chemistry, and if it weren’t for the danger and the crime involved, this would be an ideal endeavor for me, I think.
  • Other things I think about doing instead of or after finishing grad school: science writing, like trying to go get a job at a science magazine or working as a freelance science writer.  Working in a paid position in a lab somewhere.  Being a professor who specializes in the interaction of science and the public, and maybe writes popular science books.  Finding some way to be a full-time mentor to aspiring women in science (mentoring the undergrads is my FAVORITE part of my current job).
  • Or I could just wait for Husband’s company to sell for 10 million (not a completely unreasonable amount for an innovative website company such as the one he’s creating) and then play computer games all the time. And have a second home in Amsterdam.
  • And have kids.
  • Really cute kids.
  • Like the ones I watch part-time, who love me so much it totally warms my heart.  The mama told me the other day that older toddler asks her if I’m coming over on days that I’m not, and that he’s even said “Mommy, I love you…and I love Flicka Mawa” when I wasn’t even there.  Kid, I love you too.
  • Seriously, I’m off now.  Hope you all are having a better day than I am!

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Links to check out

Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 3:05 pm (Yawns, atheism, babies, baby fever, women in science)
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Tara Smith writes on her Scienceblog “Aetiology” Damn those women, out there ruining science and being lazy and depressed.

She pointed me to Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard’s Women in science — passion and prejudice.

I’m feeling some atheist pride after yesterday’s Dawkins talk. I came across this amusing T-shirt: Godless and Proud Ringer T says “GODLESS & PROUD — I outgrew the need for imaginary friends as a child.”

I’ve also been eagerly checking out a K8, a cat, a mission often since she’s expecting a baby pretty soon!

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