The first months of motherhood

I remember as exhausting, hormonal, and stressful... but I remember the joy as well:

...[S]cientists at the Baylor College of Medicine say there’s more to the baby buzz than just a rush of happy feelings. Turns out that seeing your own child smile actually activates the pleasure receptors in the brain typically associated with food, sex — and drug addiction.

“It may be that seeing your own baby’s face is like a ‘natural high,’ said Lane Strathearn, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor and and Texas Children's Hospital who studied the brain reactions of 28-first time moms.

Nice, to include drug addiction into the process of loving something like this:

"The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development," said Strathearn. "For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn't develop normally. Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child's development."

To study this relationship, Strathearn and his colleagues asked 28 first-time mothers with infants aged 5 to 10 months to watch photos of their own babies and other infants while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The machine measures blood flow in the brain. In the scans, areas of increased blood flow "light up," giving researchers a clue as to where brain activity takes place.

In some of the photos, babies were smiling or happy. In others they were sad, and in some they had neutral expressions.

They found that when the mothers saw their own infants' faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans.

Scientists are avoiding stating the obvious. For the sake of evolutionary survival, there had better be some rewards for losing sleep, sanity, and hair when you produce a small, smelly, irritating, noisy, insistent infant and need to take care of it 24/7. Love helps.

And for those who are unsure how to operate a baby: