Since Mila was born, our living room has doubled as stage.

As a toddler, she would perform dance routines to the 1990s classic, “I Like to Move It, Move It” by Reel to Real featuring the Mad Stuntman. When she was three, we briefly formed a band called RockLilyGo and would do dress rehearsals sitting together on the couch; me on a freshly purchased ukulele and Mila on a harmonica that my mom bought when I was little. When she turned four and got interested in fashion, she created a circular runway around the coffee table that centred the room.

Sometimes the show was announced. She would prepare tickets, inform us of the starting time, and remove clutter from the part of the stage she intended to use.

Some days the show would just happen. Melania and I would be sitting in the living room, working or reading or scrolling or talking on the phone, and Mila would emerge. She would position herself in such as way that it was clear she had taken the stage and inform us, first with her eyes, that a show was imminent. The subtext was clear — please close your laptops and turn your phones to silent.

The shows were largely joyful and met with applause and group hugs, but on one occasion – she was eight – Mila took the stage, waited for the audience to quiet, and began to read a poem that she had written in one of her notebooks.

War

Destruction and fear
Everywhere I hear

Cries of terror
And cries for help

They take me away
Want to run away,

But where?

War

We didn’t applaud. Instead, Melania asked who the poem was about: “a child who was killed in a war and was writing from the sky.”

I asked if they had been talking about this topic at school: “no.”

Melania asked if she wanted to talk about it: “no.”

“Okay,” I said, “but if you do want to talk about it let us know.”

And then the show ended.

When I interviewed Krista Tippett () for our podcast, Birth of A Parent, we talked about how young children are like little theologians. Without trying to appear smart or profound, they raise questions adults spend generations trying to answer. And, when they do this, they confront us with the fact that on the hard questions, we usually have made very little progress.

Sometimes this is explicit. When my nephew was five, he went to the planetarium and learned that the sun would eventually explode. He understood that the timeline was billions of years, but still his question: “then what’s the point?” Or, in Mila’s case, she was struggling with the question of why humans go to war.

Both of these examples suggest that children’s theological practice begins once they have access to more complex forms of language, but Krista would probably argue that it begins much earlier. In our conversation, she told me about an old story, found in both Jewish and Islamic traditions, in which the angel Gabriel visits babies before they are born and tells them all the secrets of the universe. Then he kisses them, and they slowly begin to forget. By the time they can speak, they have forgotten.

I am inclined to agree with Krista, but I would argue that while they may have forgotten the secrets of the universe by the time they turn two, they have not yet forgotten that they once knew them. This is why, perhaps, the word why becomes so popular in children’s speech between ages two and four. Maybe this is why researchers have found that when kids in this age range are interacting with their parents at home, they ask about 70 questions per hour. And, as any parent can tell you, the word why features prominently in many of these questions.

Before I spoke with Krista, I would have said that as they get older, the questions become harder to answer, but, after we spoke, I landed somewhere else.

As children get older, I think we the adults feel more pressure to answer the questions and we have a harder time hiding when are unable to offer clear answers. This is why I love the way in which Krista – as a professional questions asker – described how motherhood helped strengthen her ability to just sit with the hard questions; when facing hard things, to just sit with her kids, her colleagues, and her community.

I love the idea that these little theologians force us to learn how to be comfortable not knowing. And, I’ll be honest, part of the reason I love it is because it also made me feel a little better that I had so little to offer after Mila performed her poem about war in our living room. It made me feel like maybe she didn’t come looking for answers and it was enough for us to just sit and listen.

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Birth of a Parent launches new conversations every Wednesday. In the weeks ahead, we'll hear the final three episodes of the series from , and Alison Gopnik. Follow Birth of a Parent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app so you never miss an episode.

This week’s post is a little late because Mila, Melania and I were visiting my mom in what has become an annual pilgrimage to the small town where she lives a few hours outside New York City. On the last day before the journey back to the Netherlands, I was sitting in the backyard attempting to read a book, but I kept getting distracted.

The sound of a wood pecker pecking. A monarch butterfly - on her own pilgrimage to Mexico – slipping in and out of my peripheral vision. A patch of leaves fell from the cherry tree where the red-shouldered hawk had been hanging out for a day or so. A gust of wind caressed my feet. Two rabbits nibbling the plants in the small garden my mom had planted for my dad after he died, now six years ago.

There was so much going on that I could not focus on the pages and words glued in between the grayboard covers of the book I was attempting to read, but – unlike when I get distracted by a “notification” from my phone – unlike the shame that kind of distraction makes me feel – this distraction felt like an achievement.

When Mila was a toddler and we decided to walk to an appointment, she would also get “distracted”. She would inspect blades of grass. Patiently wait for the ladybug to climb on her finger. Touch the shadows that the trees and the sun had co-authored on the hot concrete. And, when we got home, we would find in her pockets evidence of the many, miniature worlds she had discovered along the way.

My job was to plan and focus. Make sure we had enough time to get where we were going and to keep us moving at a speed that was productive. Mila was then free to get distracted without jeopardizing whatever “reason” we had to be outside.

Or, maybe not? Maybe Mila was paying attention and I was distracted?

Alison Gopnik has a wonderful way of describing the two forms of consciousness that Mila and I were inhabiting on these walks. I was exercising what Alison calls spotlight consciousness – the ability to focus on a narrow objective (e.g. to arrive at our destination on time) and block out stimuli that would get in the way of achieving that goal. In contrast, Mila, like most toddlers, had a very well developed sense of what Alison calls lantern consciousness – her brain cast a wider net allowing more stimuli from more directions to capture her attention.

When I spoke with for the latest episode of Birth of a Parent entitled Is a Blade of Grass Enough, she made me think a lot about these walks we used to take and how – when I would let her – Mila would invite me into her lantern consciousness and teach me about the world. Some days, I would accept her invitation and join her spelunking expedition of the cracks in the sidewalk. Other days, when we were in a rush, I didn’t even notice that an invitation had been issued.

As an ecological engineer, Nadina spends her days studying the small pieces of nature that little kids are naturally drawn to, but which many of us taller, busier humans pass without noticing. She wrote a wonderful book called The Nature of Our Cities in which she narrates the ways innovators are using technology to make more visible the size and character of the life all around us. For example, a laser-supported tree census in Mexico City or “bio-blitzes” in Curacao where people take and upload pictures to help build a crowd-sourced database of neighbourhood level biodiversity.

However, as a mom of a baby and a toddler, Nadina made the point becoming a parent is also a very effective way of helping us to discover and connect with the smallest forms of nature. When they’re little, our kids play the role of park ranger – directing our attention to the tiny mysteries within walking distance of our homes that we would otherwise miss due to our perpetual state of focus (or distraction).

So, when I think about our last day at mom’s house this summer and my inability to concentrate on my book, it feels less likes I was unable to focus, and more like I could not help but pay attention…to the life buzzing around me. Like I had found a way to switch off the spotlight and turn on the lantern.

Now I’m back in the city where we live. The nature is smaller and the people are busier. Mila is no longer of an age that I can count on her to send me nature’s “notifications”. I am now the one who needs to remind her to “touch grass”.

Thankfully, she did spend quite a few years training me when she was little so, perhaps now I can return the favor… let’s just hope I don’t get too distracted.

Birth of a Parent launches new conversations every Wednesday. In the weeks ahead, we’ll hear from Krista Tippett, Richard Reeves, Franklin Leonard and Alison Gopnik for the final four episodes of Season One. Follow Birth of a Parent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app so you never miss an episode.

Sunday evenings have a habit of ending the same way in our house. Not because we’ve planned it that way, it’s quite the opposite to be honest.

One of us suddenly remembers something about the week ahead. Someone has to be somewhere earlier than we’d realized. Someone else is traveling. A long-planned appointment never made it onto the calendar.

Melania and I find ourselves standing in the kitchen, calendars open, trying to piece the week together before it falls apart.

The conversation starts innocently enough. Who’s home for dinner? Does someone need to leave work early? Are you sure the dentist is this week?

Over time, we’ve learned that when this conversation takes place too late on Sunday night, the edge between what is perceived as an innocent question and an existential threat gets rather thin. And, the later it gets, the thinner the edge…until…poof! It’s gone. And so is our so-called “rule” about not going to bed angry.

I never really thought of those conversations as anything special. I just assumed they were part of the background noise of family life. That is, until I spoke with Emily Oster for episode 7 of Birth of a Parent: The World’s Best Managers.

Emily is an economist, bestselling author, and one of the most influential voices in American parenting. I assumed we’d spend most of our conversation talking about data because, after all, she started a company called ParentData. Instead, she changed the way I think about those Sunday evening conversations.

Her latest book is called The Family Firm, a title that initially struck me as an odd way to think about family life. After all, who wants to run their home like a business? Melania’s first reaction was that if I ever started sending follow-up emails after a conversation, she’d divorce me. Fair enough.

But, as Emily and I talked, I began to realise that she wasn’t asking parents to become managers. She was pointing out that we already are.

The Sunday evening meeting wasn’t just about calendars, it was training in logistics, stakeholder management, and negotiation. We weren’t filling in a calendar. We were trying to anticipate problems, weigh competing priorities, negotiate responsibilities, and make decisions we’d almost certainly have to revisit.

This made me want to know more about what management and leadership skills Emily thought parenthood was particularly good at teaching and whether these skills might come in handy at work. Emily had become well known for suggesting we bring a business mindset into the home, but I wanted to test a different thesis:

Does parenthood function like a kind of business school?

And, if it does, what happens when your executive coaches (aka your kids) are pre-verbal and have not developed the tools for emotional self-regulation? What kind of lessons can they teach that a calm, verbose professor cannot?

Emily argued that in parenting we almost never know whether we’ve made the right decision. There are too many variables, too much uncertainty, and too little sleep. What we can do is make the decision in the right way: gather a reasonable amount of information, think it through, make a plan and be willing to revisit the decision when circumstances (inevitably) change.

It took me years in management to fully value decision-making process as one of the keys to handling uncertainty. But wait! What if I never learned that lesson at work? What if it was actually my transition to fatherhood during which this insight finally landed? Maybe that’s why my management style gradually changed as Mila got older?

When I am in conversations about hiring a new colleague, I frequently hear the refrain that you can’t learn management in school, you can only get it through practice, and this person - based on their resume - doesn’t seem to have a lot of practice. But, what if they do and it’s just not on their resume?

Maybe parenthood is the best management training and parents (more often moms if you look at Emily’s data) are the best managers in the world.

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Birth of a Parent launches new conversations every Wednesday. In the weeks ahead, we’ll explore the parental mind with Nadina Galle, Krista Tippett, Richard Reeves, Franklin Leonard and Alison Gopnik. Follow Birth of a Parent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app so you never miss an episode.

When I started working on Birth of a Parent, I expected to spend a lot of time thinking about brains. Hormones. Changing bodies. Sleep. Family. Evolution. You know, the usual suspects.

What I did not expect was how often I’d find myself thinking and talking about fish.

It started with Oren Harman, who told me Aristotle spent years trying to understand where eels came from since no one had seen one reproduce (we still haven’t). Aristotle’s theory was that eels spontaneously emerged from the “earth’s guts”.

A little later in that same conversation, I tried to wrap my head around a starfish who literally gives birth to its adult self before the two continue their lives as different versions of the same creature – a new take on parallel play.

When I interviewed Lee Gettler about how men’s bodies react to fatherhood and infant care, he took me on a tour of the hormone prolactin. While its name (PRO-LACTIN) refers to its role in promoting lactation, the hormone itself predates breastfeeding because it predates mammals. As Lee explained, prolactin is commonly found in male fish when taking care of their young, using their fins to fan them with oxygen rich water, and employing other ancient techniques of baby fish care. A conversation that began about testosterone and human fathers had unexpectedly landed on the theme of emotionally available fish dads.

Somewhere along the way, Birth of a Parent had become unexpectedly aquatic.

So, by the time I sat down with Lulu Miller, I had become slightly suspicious of fish. This turned out to be fortuitous timing because Lulu was well known for her book Why Fish Don’t Exist – a treatise on why fish as a taxonomic category is, scientifically speaking, indefensible. So, while I expected fish would come up in this conversation, I did not expect that they would be used as a benchmark for my experience as a human dad because, after all, fish don’t exist…

Lulu is a science journalist, co-host of Radiolab and author of that wonderfully provocative title. She has won all sorts of awards, but in my life Lulu emerged not through any of these channels, but as the maker of a podcast called Terrestrials, a show that she created after she became a mom designed for people of all ages interested in exploring “the strangeness that exists right here on earth.”

When Mila was younger, we used to listen to episodes together at bedtime. That’s how I became big fan of Lichen, the Greenland Shark and a whole bunch of other featured creatures which Lulu and her team have had on the show. Eventually, Mila moved onto to other things, but I’m still a superfan. Where else can you hear original music about Dung Beetles and Artic Squirrels? Shout out: Alan Goffinski!

Now, while Lulu’s book is nominally about fish, it is also an exploration of why humans are so determined to make sense of a world that refuses to stay neatly organized, and the danger when we insist that our categories are an accurate depiction of reality. Lulu makes a very compelling case, which is why I was surprised when she told me that her first two children’s books are essentially lists. One is a list of trucks (Trucky Roads) and the other (forthcoming) is a list of balls.

What was going on here? After a decade long campaign against categories, why had this lauded science journalists decided to spend her time making lists of trucks and balls? What (or who) could have persuaded her to reconsider her position on how to find truth in the universe?

The answer, of course, is children. Specifically, her own children and the experience of motherhood. As I listened to Lulu speak about her birth as a mother, I found myself thinking about how parenthood changes our relationship to certainty. How it changes our expectations of what can be known and how we deal with the limits.

In Lulu’s case, for example, she spent her career using questions to demonstrate the fragile nature of the categories humans create to understand the world. Now, after her birth as a mother, she seemed to have added a new tool to the toolbox:

PLAY.

When I listen to Terrestrials or when I read Trucky Roads, what I see is an artist using playfulness to challenge our understanding of reality. Using laughter and surprise to make me rethink what I presume to know. And it works.

Deep in the episode, I asked Lulu at what age she sits her kids down and tells them the sad truth that fish don’t exist. Does she let the legend persist for as long as possible like so many families do with Santa Claus? Or does her vocation demand that she dispel them of this particular category of truth as early as possible?

If you want to find out, you’ll have to listen, but what I will say here is that it’s a good thing Lulu has honed her skills in the domain of play because a well-reasoned, award winning book turns out to be far less compelling when it comes to delivering this message to a kid. As Lulu puts it: “as an audience, kids demand far more.”

Check out the episode: The Illusion of Knowing with Lulu Miller.

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We’re halfway through the first season of Birth of a Parent, with new conversations arriving every Wednesday. In the weeks ahead, we’ll explore the parental mind with Emily Oster, , , Alison Gopnik, and . Follow Birth of a Parent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app so you never miss an episode.

Also, if you are curious about what we can learn as moms and dads from animal parents, check out ’s Substack and her wonderful new book The Creatures Guide to Caring. More on Elizabeth and her book in a future post!

If an anthropologist wandered into our home in January, she’d probably assume we were conducting an experiment.

My wife Melania grew up in Mexico. I grew up in New York. We are raising our daughter in the Netherlands. So, when the boxes come down from the storage space behind the washing machine in late October, we have a lot of traditions to plan.

One day, we’ll be trick or treating dressed up as K-Pop witches. The next day we’ll be organizing our altar for Dia de Los Muertos, assembling pictures of friends and family who have passed away alongside an assortment of small candles, a husk of dry corn, and a series of other artifacts that remind us of nuestros muertos.

Sitting at the kitchen table, we will chart the dates for the Dutch Sinterklaas, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah, coordinating alongside schedules for work and travel. Who will do what and when? What gifts will belong to each tradition? How will we negotiate the consumption and pacing of sweets?

The playlist will evolve as the months pass, taking us on a journey from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to Natalia Lafourcade’s rendition of La Llorona, to Jack Black’s Hannukah Oh Hannukah. Starting roundabout the Winter Solstice, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah will become the soundtrack for our morning coffee, which we must drink in the living room. Also, unlike the other songs, Cohen must be played on vinyl.

By the time we get to Tres Reyes in January, we will be sitting around the table with Amanda, Mark and their kids, drinking hot cocoa, cutting La Rosca and waiting to see who will get the piece with the plastic baby Jesus. That person will have to prepare a party with tamales in February, but we all know that the party will never actually happen, so the stakes feel far less daunting.

In the background to this final event in our annual melange of ritual there will be remnants of all the traditions that have come before. The altar may still be up, the Christmas tree will definitely be up (probably for a while), candy wrappers from Halloween will be discovered hiding in strange places until the end of winter.

The interesting thing is that before Mila was born, we didn’t do any of this. Like, none of it. And that was fine. Nothing felt like it was missing. But now, when we sit down to plan the calendar in early October, the idea of leaving anything out feels kind of disturbing. And not just to Mila, to us as well.

Until I spoke with anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, I had never really stopped to ask why? Why do new parents, almost instinctively, get hungry for ritual? Why do traditions that haven’t mattered since we were kids suddenly matter so much? And why does leaving something out feel like such a disturbing idea?

In episode five of our new podcast Birth of a Parent — The Rituals that Hold Us Together —Dimitris uses a combination of anthropology and biology to answer these questions. Plus, he explains why he has to make his morning coffee even if he isn’t going to drink it.

Dimitris has spent decades studying rituals around the world, from fire-walking ceremonies to religious pilgrimages. And, when he studies them, he also measures what happens inside the body when humans practice ritual.

His research has uncovered something both simple and profound. Humans turn to ritual when life becomes uncertain. Not because rituals change the world, but because they help us navigate a world that has suddenly become unpredictable. His research shows how ritual can calm us down - something he measures in the variability of our heartrate and the electrodermal activity on the surface of our skin.

Dimitris argues that this is one reason new parents become such committed ritual practitioners. We often think of bedtime routines, birthday traditions, or holiday rituals as things we create for our children, but the conversation with Dimitris made me wonder whether we have the story backwards.

Perhaps parents need rituals just as much as their kids. After all, becoming a parent can be one of the most disorienting transitions in a human life. And, while rituals don’t make the uncertainty disappear, they do give us something familiar to hold onto while everything else is changing. They buy us time to recalibrate reality.

Children seem to understand this instinctively. They are often the first to notice when we skip a step or change the order. Not because they are obsessed with routine, but because rituals tell them something deeper. They tell them something matters. They indicate things are okay. And, perhaps that’s why every October our family ends up having the same conversation all over again and agreeing that even though we will be several kilos heavier by the time we get to Tres Reyes in January, skipping something is not an option. In this family, this is just the way things are done.

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The first five episodes of Birth of a Parent are out now, with new conversations arriving every Wednesday. Early support makes a big difference for a new show, so please follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts!

Part of my preparation for fatherhood was to take singing lessons. I don’t have a good singing voice, but someone had suggested that for baby Mila, whether I sang well or not was less important than whether I was comfortable singing. If she perceived I was comfortable, this would shape her relationship with music, and with me.

I think the advice paid off.

From day one music has played an important role in our relationship. Beatboxing, for example, was something I found she really enjoyed - see evidence above.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, I would bounce her on a big orange yoga ball and sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Thanks to my lessons in which we focused on this song, I found myself really leaning into the way Cohen uses the lyrics to paint the progression when it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth…

When Mila was four, we had a band called RockLilyGo in which she did the vocals and I produced the beats. As Mila put it in our first single, Rock – because music is going to rock; Lily- because that’s her stage name; and Go – because we can’t stop. And although the band did stop (creative differences), music continued to shape our relationship in many other ways.

So, when I spoke with developmental neuroscientist Vicky Leong for the latest episode of Birth of a Parent podcast, I found myself wishing I had known Vicky when Mila was little. If I had, I think I would have volunteered us as subjects in her lab so she could measure what was happening under the skin when I was singing or beatboxing. Based on our conversation, I bet she would have found the electrical activity in Mila and my brain was harmonizing.

Vicky studies something scientists call neural synchrony: The subtle process through which parents and children become attuned to one another. Long before babies understand language, they are already reading faces, following voices, responding to rhythm, and learning when another person is truly with them.

Parents adjust constantly too, slowing down, speeding up, following a child’s attention, trying to get back onto the same wavelength.

In order to measure this, Vicky built one of the world’s first laboratories capable of recording the brain activity of babies and adults at the same time. That meant transforming neuroscience into something that looked less like a lab and more like a well-stocked playroom, complete with nursery rhymes, funny glasses, toys, and researchers willing to sing The Wheels on the Bus at a moment’s notice.

One of the most striking things Vicky’s research has uncovered is why this matters.

In one study, she and her team wanted to see if babies learn language more easily when they can see the speaker’s eyes. They invented a set of “nonsense words” and had adults speak to the babies. The babies paid attention whether or not the speaker was looking at them, but they only learned the language patterns when the speaker’s eyes were clearly visible. Eye contact appeared to synchronize the infant’s brain activity with the speaker’s. It was a way of telling them: This is for you. And that message opened up a learning pathway in the baby’s brain.

Since talking to Vicky, I‘ve been going back to videos like the one I shared at the top of this post and watching them again. Moments like those were magical without knowing the science, but I find these new insights make them even more powerful. Somehow, this new information about how our brains were (probably) dancing together as I beatboxed or sang sharpens my memories even further.

Mila is now twelve and, funnily enough, her reaction to me beatboxing while looking deeply into her eyes is almost the same. She looks at me as if I am a strange creature (now with raised eyebrows) and, eventually, she laughs. I know the inquisitive look and the laughter carry a different meaning these days, but I like to believe it’s still built around the melody and rhythm we began to compose in those early years. And, even it isn’t, I’m going to keep singing because...I can’t stop.

The first four episodes of Birth of a Parent are out now, with new conversations arriving every Wednesday. Early support makes a big difference for a new show, so please follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts!

In the weeks ahead, we’ll hear from guests including Emily Oster, Krista Tippett, Richard Reeves, Alison Gopnik, Franklin Leonard, Lulu Miller, Nadina Galle, and Dimitris Xygalatas.

Plus, my mom makes a cameo in every episode!

The first time I held my daughter Mila against my bare chest, she did exactly what millions of years of evolution had prepared her to do. She went in search of a nipple. It took me a minute to realise what she was up to, but, once I did, I thought to myself: just 40 minutes old and I am about to disappoint her for the first time.

The thought made me giggle and I found myself explaining the situation to her. There were a lot of things I could do, but this particular one was outside of my capabilities. However, as luck would have it, I did know someone who could help. She was recovering in a room nearby, but we would meet her very soon.

As Mila grew, I often returned to that moment in my mind. It captured for me something for which no parenting book had prepared me. We talk about birth as the moment that a new baby enters the world, but we spend far less time talking about the other newcomers in the room…

…the parents.

The more times I came back to this first encounter with Mila, the more it started to feel like another kind of birth story, the one of my birth as a father.

At the time, I had just been appointed as Director of the Van Leer Foundation, an organisation that for nearly 70 years has worked to support parents and young children around the world. I had spent a decade learning and sharing the science of early childhood development. A big part of my job was to explain to policymakers how babies learn, to dazzle them with facts about how quickly the infant brain absorbs new information, and to explain why the caring adults around them are so important.

But I had remarkably little understanding of what was happening inside me. Why did I feel like I no longer had control of my thoughts? Why did ordinary moments come with a flood of extraordinary emotion? Why did her head smell sooo good!

I knew the feelings were real, but I couldn’t explain them. I didn’t have the language and I didn’t know where to look. Psychology? Biology? Culture?

These questions eventually became the starting point for Birth of a Parent, a podcast that chronicles the journey I went on (am still on) and some of the characters I spoke with (and joked with) along the way.

Today, I am excited to introduce the first three characters: a historian of science, a neuroscientist, and an anthropologist who together helped me understand that becoming a parent isn’t just a psychological transition. It’s a biological one too.

In episode one, I talk to Oren Harman who studies metamorphosis in the natural world. Oren reminded me that metamorphosis isn’t an oddity in nature. Butterflies are the famous example, but three quarters of animal species undergo some form of radical, post-embryonic transformation. So, why are humans so reluctant to imagine that we might also be metamorphic creatures? Oren thinks we are and that the transition to parenthood is one of our most notable morphological changes.

In episode two, I speak with neuroscientist Susana Carmona. Years ago, she and two fellow PhD students were driving home when one of them casually asked: “Why don’t we study what pregnancy does to the brain?” They assumed that research on this subject already existed, but it didn’t. When they searched the medical literature, they found centuries of work on pregnant bodies, but almost nothing on pregnant brains. In many medical textbooks, the illustrations of pregnant women didn’t even include a head. Today, thanks in part to their work, we know that pregnancy reshapes the brain in ways that are more dramatic than adolescence.

After talking to Susana, I found myself a little bit jealous and - I’ll be honest - it didn’t help that she told me I should be. I was in awe of the power with which a woman’s body can adapt to create and sustain life, but left wondering what my biology had to offer. Thankfully, I found someone with an answer.

In episode three, Lee Gettler explains to me that involved fathers also undergo major biological changes. Testosterone falls and hormones associated with caregiving rise. In one study, Lee himself arrived at the maternity ward carrying zip-lock bags and spit tubes so he could measure what happened in his own body the first time he held his newborn son. Lee’s conclusion: men are also built to care.

Oren, Susana and Lee come from very different disciplines, and yet they all describe the same phenomenon. The transition to parenthood is its own developmental stage; a third window (after early childhood and adolescence) that science has only recently opened. A period in which our brains and bodies team up to help us learn at high velocity, developing skills valuable for our kids, but also for society as a whole.

Mila recently turned twelve. Scientists tell us she’s entering another remarkable period of development. Watching her now, I sometimes think back to that first morning in the hospital. She instinctively knew what to look for, but I didn’t. I needed more time to figure it out because no one had told me…

…when a baby is born, a parent is also born.

The first three episodes of Birth of a Parent are out now, with new conversations arriving every Wednesday. Early support makes a big difference for a new show, so please follow on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts!

In the weeks ahead, we’ll hear from guests including Emily Oster, Krista Tippett, Richard Reeves, Alison Gopnik, Franklin Leonard, Lulu Miller, Nadina Galle, Vicky Leong and Dimitris Xygalatas.

Plus, my mom makes a cameo in every episode!

Mila was 8 months old and it was my turn to take her to childcare. Time was short and I had an important interview later in the day. I could feel the anxiety brewing in my chest, my mind already at the office. Observing me from her highchair, Mila could see I was distracted. For just a moment, I turned away from our breakfast routine – this was her chance. She gathered a handful of peas in her little fist and launched them onto the floor. For the fifth time that morning, I was down on my knees.

“Stop! Stand up! Step away from the peas!”

Mila and I both turned toward Melania’s bellowing voice. “She is not testing gravity, she is testing you. Maybe try a different strategy,” she said.

There is a theory in neuroscience of the brain as a prediction machine: constantly collecting data about the world and updating its code. In this metaphor, babies are running science experiments every minute of every day. What will happen if I touch the blade of grass? If I cry at night, will someone come? If I throw peas on the floor, will my dad pick them up … again? With each experiment, they adjust their predictions until their brains discover what patterns are reliable.

When it comes to updating our prediction machines, new parents are not as fast as babies, but we are pretty impressive. As Dr Helena Rutherford at Yale University puts it, “You are your baby’s external prefrontal cortex.” New moms and dads become hypervigilant to anything that might agitate their babies and quickly learn how to soothe them once something sets them off. We learn to use our prefrontal cortex to help them regulate their emotions until they can do it on their own.

This is not easy. We need to learn to see life through their eyes, but – given how fast they are updating their worldview – it’s hard to keep up. Moreover, we have to do this without relying on spoken language while constantly task-switching and sleep deprived. It requires an incredibly flexible mind. Indeed, the transition to parenthood can feel like a version of CrossFit for cognitive flexibility, except the coach (aka the baby) cries when you get it wrong; you have to feed them or else they get angry; you aren’t doing it with a group of peers in the park; and the schedule is 24-7.

Thankfully, our brains and bodies have evolved to meet the moment. The parental mind is exceptionally capable of learning and adaptation. The early years of parenthood are one of the periods in adult life when our brain is most flexible. But, just like babies, if we are not cared for, if our “body budget” is in the red, we also become rigid. We also have trouble taking perspective. We also struggle to regulate our emotions.

Three years ago, we decided to focus Early Childhood Matters on the theme of parental wellbeing. We made this choice having emerged from the Covid pandemic, during which the whole world got a front-row seat to the daily challenges facing parents and other caregivers. As we launch the third and closing issue of this series, I am moved by the collection of 119 scientists, artists, policymakers and executives from 27 countries who have shared their perspectives on parental wellbeing, both as leaders in their fields of expertise, and as mothers, fathers and grandparents themselves.

My main takeaway from this mosaic of voices is not that parents are struggling, but that they are the most resourceful people on the planet. Every day they invent new ways to make ends meet, spark curiosity, or turn tears into laughter. From hiding vegetables in dinner to turning a cardboard box into a spaceship – the parental mind is pure, relentless creativity born out of love and necessity.

Now, imagine if they were truly supported …

This article was originally published in Early Childhood Matters in 2026.

When my daughter Mila was 5 months old, my wife Melania left for a multi-day trip. This was the first time I had been alone with her for an extended period of time, and I felt very nervous.

Mila was not a great sleeper, so I spent a lot of time walking around trying to get her to doze off. One grey day, I found myself pushing the stroller through a shopping area in the city centre. The streets were buzzing. Everything around us seemed to be moving incredibly fast. I was tired and dressed in clothing that I would not have worn for a public outing in the “before” times. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window. I needed a shave, a haircut, and a new sweatshirt. I was in a state of disrepair. I suddenly felt ashamed and glanced around to see if anyone was looking at me, but no one was paying attention.

I felt as if I had become a ghost. Like in one of those movies, where I was wandering among the living, unaware that I had died. The sense that everyone seemed to be operating at a different speed and no one noticed me was the first clue that I had passed into a new realm. This reality was slowly sinking in when I noticed another man sitting at a café. He was at an outdoor table with a baby asleep in a stroller next to him. He too needed a shave and a haircut. His sweatpants needed a wash. Like me just a few minutes earlier, he was staring into the ether. “Another ghost,” I thought to myself. I tried to catch his gaze, but he didn’t see me, and I wasn’t brave enough to say hello.

If I had been able to read this issue of Early Childhood Matters back then, I would have had more insight into why I felt like a ghost and what seeing this other father had triggered. I would have understood how the rising prolactin and oxytocin levels in my body that were helping me learn to interpret and care for Mila had also created within me a deep need for connection with other adults. I would have found comfort in the idea that the roots of this sensation could be traced back hundreds of thousands of years. Also, the examples of policies and programmes described in this journal might have given me the courage to talk to this other father. I would have had more ideas about how to start a conversation and more confidence that taking this step would be well received. After all, he was probably feeling just like me.

As Mila grew older and I gained experience as a dad, I became more comfortable talking to strangers, especially other parents with whom it was easy to find common ground. It was as if a new part of me had emerged, an extrovert I had never met. Today, this change in my persona is the source of much embarrassment for my daughter and surprise for my wife.

On that grey day, just seeing another ghost made me feel better, but now I realise how much better I might have felt if I had sat down to share a conversation and a coffee. We would have discussed how it was not just our kids experiencing rapid changes to their brain and body; as newborn dads, so were we. We would both have left feeling a bit less lonely. Who knows, maybe I would have made a new friend. Had I known then what I know today, my ghost story would have had a different ending – something that I hope this journal can help make happen for the millions of newly born ghosts walking the streets today.

This article was originally published in Early Childhood Matters in 2025.

“How old are you?” he asked his daughter.

“Twu,” she answered, still learning to form the sounds of human language.

“And me,” he asked. “How old am I?”

“Twu,” she replied. “Yuu twu!”

Before I had a child, a friend shared this story. It made me giggle.

Just a few years into the world, the little girl did not yet grasp the idea that her father had a life before her. The story portrayed the curious, often funny process babies and toddlers go through as they develop a sense of who they are in relation to other people.

Having since become a father, I reflect on this story differently. As Lucy Jones puts it in her article for this journal, it reminds me that when a baby is born, a parent is also born.

Over the last 50 years scientists have learned a lot about early childhood. Amid the growing body of research, I have always found the neuroscience particularly compelling. During the early years of a child’s life, the brain makes one million new neural connections every second. I love talking to people about this fact and showing them images of babies’ neural networks, which look like celestial bodies. I see their sense of wonder when they hear this information for the first time. I think science has helped us understand why our earliest experiences shape so much of the people we become. It has given us a powerful window into how the early years are written into our bodies.

What if we looked at early parenthood in a similar way to how we have come to look at early childhood?

These insights have made their way into the cultural zeitgeist. Parents now obsess about how interactions with their children today can shape their futures. We have become fixated on how we shape them. This has generated new thinking and interest about what babies and toddlers need to thrive. It has stimulated an immense body of popular literature on the topic of parenting and – in some countries – led to important changes in healthcare and education.

But all of this has not changed our understanding of parenthood in the same way. We have not put the same level of scientific and cultural energy into asking the question: how do they shape us?

Alongside the growing enthusiasm for early childhood have come new pressures and expectations of parents. This has taken place during a period in which women have joined the formal labour market and many of us have moved to cities, living further from our extended families. It may be the busiest time in human history to be a parent and it is arguably the first time our species has attempted to raise children in a team of just two people. The work parents do has changed, but the job description has not been updated. The story of parenthood needs retelling.

What if we looked at early parenthood in a similar way to how we have come to look at early childhood? A period of five years in which every dimension of our identity undergoes a metamorphosis. Our brains and bodies soften and reorganise. We learn and adapt with exceptional speed. Our web of social relationships transforms. We experience feelings for which we need new words that we struggle to pronounce. Our days and nights are in equal part awe and exhaustion.

What if we agreed that when a baby is born, a parent is also born? How would it help us reimagine what parents need? How might it change how we care for them?

(a version of this article was originally published in Early Childhood Matters, which is full of articles and interviews illustrating how leaders from different countries around the world are caring for babies, toddlers and their parents)