Some of the strongest parental instincts happen without conscious thought. The urge to check on a sleeping baby. To stay close. To pick them up when they cry.

Becoming a mother also brings about an extraordinary shift in priorities. As the late British psychotherapist and author Naomi Stadlen wrote, “motherhood can be relentless. The dependency, the need, the constant pull of being someone’s entire world…”

For all mammals, raising young demands enormous time, energy and resources, requiring mothers to place their offspring’s needs ahead of almost everything else.

So just how precisely does the brain make that shift? Our newly published research sought to answer that question.

Using studies in mice, we identified part of the brain circuitry that drives a mother’s urge to interact with her newborn. We found an essential pathway linking a hormone-sensing region of the brain to its reward network.

Activated by the pregnancy hormone placental lactogen and the milk-production hormone prolactin, this pathway helps make caring for a newborn rewarding rather than simply necessary. Remarkably, we were even able to switch that drive on and off........

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