Well-Grounded by Kelly Lambert

Author:Kelly Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Parenting

Time to Recalculate Life’s Contingencies

ALTHOUGH I HAD SEEN many maternal rats efficiently attending to their pups in my laboratory by the time I became pregnant myself, I started to gain a new respect for the seemingly effortless parental responses in these little rodents as my own delivery date approached. As I signed up for baby classes at our local hospital and accumulated a stack of parenting how-to books on my nightstand—including the popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting—my appreciation for the rat moms, who just seemed to know what to do, grew immensely. Whereas I had a wonderful husband to help with the parenting—and was scheduled to deliver in a hospital with elaborate equipment, a full professional staff, and the requisite buffet of drugs—my laboratory rat moms were on their own. No classes, no books, no rat social support, no baby rat showers, no rat mommy blogs, no hospital, no drugs—nonetheless, most maternal rats successfully deliver 10–14 healthy pups. I would leave the bulging pregnant rat in the lab on one day, and the next day the new mom would be hovering over her tidied-up nest and pups, almost looking tranquil as the little pink rat babies huddled and suckled underneath her. She had it all under control. By comparison, I felt woefully unprepared when held to the competency standards of nature’s vast spectrum of prepared and resilient mothers.

And the rodent mom’s impressive parenting skills don’t stop there. Without other rats around to help (at least in their laboratory cages), and in the absence of any form of rodent day care for her clan of 12 or so pups, all of the caretaking is on her shoulders. Extended nursing periods ensue, with hungry offspring rigorously tugging at twelve nipples strategically located across her entire belly. These small animals quickly morph into larger, juvenile animals with teeth—all focused on this mama rat’s nipple zone. In the midst of dispensing all of this nourishment, the pups aren’t able to go to the bathroom on their own in the early days following birth—they require a little nudging in the form of the mother licking the anal-genital area to prompt them to eliminate their physiological waste. As seen in Figure 10, there are no wipes or diapers for these animals—it’s protein out (of the pup), protein in (to the mother). It’s not very scientific of me to say so, but EEEWWWWWW!

So now you understand my respect for these rodent mamas. In the lab during my first pregnancy I vividly remember watching the moms retrieve their pups, hover over them in their arched back position to provide equal access to her nipples during nursing sessions, and, when they weren’t nursing, gently hold the pups upside down in their hand-like paws to lick their backsides. Wow, I was in awe. I hoped I would be as successful as these uber-mamma rodents were.

Both the mother and the neuroscientist in me wanted to learn more about these supercharged rodent mothers. Consequently, my long-time colleague from the

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