Parenting Is a Developmental Milestone

Parenthood isn’t just about raising tiny humans. Parenthood reshapes the adults too. When I became a mother, I thought the hardest part after giving birth would be swaddling, sleepless nights, or feeding schedules.

I had faith that everything about being a mother would just come naturally…

Spoiler Alert: I was wrong.

Early motherhood made me feel like a stranger in my own mind. Forgetful. Tired. Less patient. Agitated. More tender. Even the way I processed stress felt unfamiliar, as if my brain had been quietly rearranged overnight.

And I wondered, why didn’t anyone warn me?

Talking to other moms, I saw we all shared the same invisible truth: our brains and identities changed after kids. We joked about it on the outside, but inside I was full of questions.

So I dug into neuroscience. One landmark study followed over 100 first-time mothers and found that during late pregnancy, mothers’ brains showed drops in cortical volume and thickness, then partial recovery postpartum. The reshaping was uneven, network-specific, and even varied by childbirth mode. In other words: the brain is working, adapting, rebuilding- just as the person is.

The science confirmed it: parenthood actually reshapes the adult brain, rewiring pathways for empathy, decision-making, and emotional regulation.

The hardest part of becoming a mother wasn’t at all what I expected, it was realizing that motherhood is a rite of passage, carved through growing pains and brain rewiring. Just like puberty, just like menopause, this transformation has a name: Matrescence. And owning it may be the most empowering work a mother can do.

Matrescence and Beyond

Anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term matrescence in the 1970s to describe this transformation for mothers, a passage as profound as puberty or menopause, but centered on motherhood.

Yes, research now shows that fathers, adoptive parents, and caregivers also undergo measurable neurological, hormonal, and psychological shifts when raising children. Parenthood reshapes everyone involved. But for the sake of this work, I want to focus on mothers because matrescence is our milestone journey, one that has been overlooked, unnamed, and underestimated for far too long.

The Collective Nervous System

Here’s the harder truth: a mother’s struggle doesn’t stay contained. It ripples outward.

When a mother’s nervous system is dysregulated, it doesn’t just touch her. It spills into her child, her partner, her household, her career, her community. I see this every day and I feel it in myself.

Mothers wrestle with:

• Children’s needs that never pause- meltdowns, night wakings, constant demands.

• Neurodiversity and mental health- autism, ADHD, anxiety, depression.

• Big emotions in little bodies- tantrums, sensory overwhelm, explosive tempers.

• Modern pressures- screens, dopamine chasing, the fight against overstimulation.

• Invisible labor- the meals, the schedules, the remembering for everyone.

• Emotional weight- guilt, fear of messing it up, the pressure to “do it right.”

• Isolation- doing it alone while the world cheers for “bouncing back.”

• Self-loss- grieving who you were while stumbling into who you are becoming.

And all of it lands on individuals who are already running on empty. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not abstract. It’s happening in real kitchens, bedrooms, and car rides every single day. It’s messy. It’s relentless. And it’s reshaping the emotional climate of entire households.

The Silent Gap

Children are given scaffolding at every turn-schools, therapy, enrichment programs- to support their growth while mothers’ development is overlooked and left in isolation. But the greater calling, the essential need, is to hold both generations as they grow.

We treat parents as finished adults, when in reality they are in the midst of one of the most profound reorganizations of their lives.

Dr. Linda Mayes of the Yale Child Study Center reminds us: a parent’s emotional growth directly shapes a child’s outcome. And Dr. Oscar Serrallachdescribes the state of so many modern mothers as postnatal depletion(fatigue, brain fog, identity loss) symptoms that can linger for years if left unaddressed.

This is the problem no one wants to name: a collective epidemic of dysregulated parents.

Early Parenthood Development (EPD)

The solution begins with recognition.

Parenthood and matrescence is not just a private season, it is a biological and cultural milestone that demands intentional support. The Early Parenthood Development (EPD) Framework names this stage and calls for structured scaffolding to help parents through it.

EPD is:

• Universal — experienced by all caregivers.

• Biological — driven by hormonal, neurological, and emotional shifts.

• Formative — shaping not only families, but the communities those families sustain.

Why This Problem Matters

When parents break, families fracture.

When parents thrive, families grow resilient.

I believe the dysregulation of mothers and caregivers is one of the most urgent issues of our time and the solution cannot be more survival, more advice, or one more parenting hack. It must be systemic scaffolding for parents themselves.

This is the work of Early Parenthood Development. It’s the problem I’m devoting my life to solving- eventually through new tools and technologies, but first it begins with a cultural shift.

If we want whole children, we must first support the nervous systems of the parents raising them.

The case for Early Parenthood Development isn’t abstract. It’s lived, it’s embodied, and it’s everywhere we look. We are raising a generation of children inside the nervous systems of depleted adults and that reality matters enough to be solved.

The future of childhood begins with parents. And the future of parents begins here.