Negative emotions and the new parent
If and when we are lucky enough to become parents, many of us enter a beautiful, exciting, exhausting, and overwhelming new world. There are so many unknowns that come with the incredible gift of parenthood, and these new challenges often bring with them a set of feelings that new parents can find surprising and difficult to handle. Many new mothers experience the baby blues in the first weeks of parenthood, and many new mothers and fathers develop postpartum depression and anxiety symptoms in the first 6 months of parenthood. Even those of us who do not experience a postpartum mood or anxiety disorder can have feelings of sadness, anxiety, guilt, shame, and other negative emotions arise more frequently than we might have expected when we anticipated becoming parents. These negative emotions can hit us like a ton of bricks during a time that is expected to be one filled with joy and love, and they are often driven by a focus on what we think is “wrong”.
There are likely many reasons why we are more attuned to perceived problems and imperfections as new parents. Knowing some of these can be very helpful when we struggle with challenging feelings during a time we think should only be joyous and lovely.
Here are some potential causes of negative emotions in the new parent:
We may be more attuned to possible imperfections in our parenting styles and in the child rearing environment because aiming to be the best parents we can be is consistent with our core values. For many of us, becoming parents is a dream come true, and we want to and feel compelled to do everything we can to make our children’s lives the very best they can possibly be. Thus, it is completely understandable that our internal monitoring system would be tuned to pick up the negatives in our environment.
There is also likely to be an evolutionarily beneficial aspect to focusing on providing the safest and very best life possible for our offspring. Those individuals who did so in a dangerous world filled with predators, poisonous plants, and untreatable diseases were probably more likely to keep their children safe enough to grow into adults who were then able to reproduce and pass on their genetic material to future generations.
There are neurological underpinnings to the monitoring for danger many new parents experience. Indeed, research suggests that an overactive threat response (as marked by an overactive amygdala) is a hallmark feature of new parenthood, and this overactive threat response guides our attention, behavior, and emotional responses.
As most of us know from personal experience and as has been demonstrated in a number of research studies sleep deprivation — a well known hallmark of new parenthood — further increases the intensity of our negative response to perceived problems. When we are sleep deprived, our threat response is more sensitive and the part of the brain that typically serves to dampen that threat response (the prefrontal cortex) is less active. As a result, sleep deprivation creates an “all gas, no breaks” situation, and we can very quickly move into anxiety, anger, guilt, and shame in situations that wouldn’t otherwise cause that response.
If you’d like to read more about the postpartum changes occurring in the brain of new mothers and fathers, you can do so here: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/postpartum_brain
If you are a new parent and find yourself struggling with negative emotions, please know that you are not alone. Connecting with other new parents and understanding the neurological and psychological underpinnings that commonly drive increased negative emotions can help, but if you find that this is not enough, please know that there are wonderful resources available to you. Individual therapy can be tremendously effective as can many of the online resources available through Postpartum Support International (https://www.postpartum.net/).