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Comment by ademup | Hacker News Reader

"Certain areas within parts of the brain linked to attachment, nurturing, empathy and the ability to interpret and react appropriately to a baby’s behavior had more gray and white matter between 12 and 16 weeks than they did between two and four weeks."

For you father-programmers out there: did you notice any changes in your programming/work abilities around the 12-16 week mark?

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I always took off 3 months from work per baby. There's no point coding when you're always sleep deprived. Last year the company agreed to about half the salary, so I'd work from home on some things, or come in half the week or half a day as needed.

Then again I did notice I was very good at understanding baby talk.

Taking from some old notes of my 5 month old baby:

"eh eh eh", but no crying at 6 AM = "I need a diaper change" or "I'm hungry"

rapid kicking = excited

wide open arms while lying down = "pick me up"

"uh huh/mmm" with slight head inclining = yes.

when mother is saying something, baby laughs, turns head towards me, "uh huh/mmm" with inclined head = "mother is right" or "I told you so"

laughing and turning away = "I like that"

licking lips = "I want to eat whatever you're eating"

"aaaaaaaaaaa" = conversation or song

long, drawn out, angry crying = "I'm tired and I don't know how to sleep"

For me when my Daughter was born we did formula. And I took care of her for 4 weeks at night time.

Screaming at night = “my parents are bad they aren’t feeding me they should be locked up”

Kicking feet = “oh god I’m wet please change me it’s so gross”

> “my parents are bad they aren’t feeding me they should be locked up”

lol I remember this, we called it the 'worst parents in the world' cry. It continues forever, the form changes as they get older but the message is the same

You could extrapolate that into an app. :-)

But seriously, congratulations on getting to that level of bonding with child. It was also the same for me and it is magical!

It's quite different to the first kid so I don't think the same translations work with most other kids.

This reminds me so much of the Simpsons episode with Homer's long lost brother, Herb (he invents a machine to translate baby talk).

I think, from my own experience, babies learn to communicate in a two way fashion - they try noises and responses with their caregivers, and when the caregivers respond in an agreeable fashion, the baby stores that bit of communication away to try again later (and possibly reinforce).

So I think some of their communication is learned (signals for positive/negative), and quite specific to the baby-parent pair, while some will be instinctual (e.g. I imagine the excited kicking to be related to an adrenal surge or something, and early-infant crying is definitely an instinctual distress signal)

agree. We did some infant sign language (using what seemed to us like very exaggerated motions for “milk” “more” “diaper” and a few others I can’t recall now). I was amazed (and slightly relieved) when each child could express themself a bit.

> "I'm tired and I don't know how to sleep"

A surprisingly common problem with very young children. Maybe also some adults.

I'll echo others on this thread and say at 12-16 weeks your work abilities are dominated by lack of sleep/just recovering from lack of sleep.

However, I think the implication is that these changes stick around. After we finally hit our "parenting rhythm" around 6 months to a year, I did find that many of the soft skills were coming easier to me than they had before I was a parent. I found was getting better at doing presentations, reading emotions/intention, doing mentoring, and organizing others to accomplish goals, Now correlation is not causation, it could also be I was just transitioning into a more senior role anyway, and I've got a sample size of 1, but I'd like to propose a mechanism: constantly practicing my public speaking by reading "The Napping House" to a miniature tyrant who communicates only through facial expressions and screaming, is your responsibility to teach everything to including successfully eating food, and requires a logistics train on par with an Army brigade just to leave the house changed my brain and resultded in transferable skills.

I was basically useless as a programmer at 12-16 weeks. I was also basically useless at 2-4 weeks, but that was largely because of the sleep deprivation and constant need to run around doing chores. (What they don't tell new parents: newborns spend 6-7 hours/day attached to the boob and do so in shifts of about 15 minutes on + 45 minutes off, so mommy basically has a full-time job breastfeeding and daddy has a full-time job doing everything else.)

I started to get some of my old coding mojo back around 8 months and at 18 months I'm IMHO better than I've ever been, but the newborn phase is basically a complete write-off. Parental leave exists for a reason.

> ...but the newborn phase is basically a complete write-off.

Good for you. The FANG (you can guess) company I worked for stack-ranked me at the bottom of the tar pit in my write-off year with zero increase in comp, followed by another quarter of intense improvement program after which they decided I still wasn't good enough. Disagreements ensued for three more quarters and then that was that. The result... unemployment.

Books and help manuals like to tell you newborns sleep for however many hours a day, to try and make it sound easy, but like you said - newborns only sleep for small periods at a time, including at night.

I spent an insane number of hours in the middle of the night bouncing on a swiss exercise ball, holding the baby, in nothing but my pants, in the dark, with the tv on (but muted), to coax the baby back to sleep. Honestly ... this sorta stuff needs to mentioned more to let prospective parents know what they're in for.

Since having a child, I've nothing but total admiration for any single parent - how they manage without a fulltime partner would be beyond my ability.

Oh yes, and how.

You're so sleep starved you program like a turkey and have to try and do mundane, low risk things for much of the day. Simpler fixes, documentation, clean up technical debt in test cases etc etc. Limit tricky things for the morning after you've warmed up and keep that burst short. But this is of course from birth until n months.

I'm guessing the lifestyle changes are going to have an effect that is large and the effects discussed here, while they may indeed be statistically signficant (who knows?), are going to have an effect so incredibly small by comparison that they really aren't worth considering. But that's pure prejudice on my part - we'll see if there's any data capable of rejecting that hypothesis.

The changes to your sleep are huge. Now if you've had twins... Yeah.

I've always felt very child-focused by that point and working becomes more difficult. I've moved towards moving my work schedule around my kids rather than the other way around because I get very unhappy prioritizing work first.

So, without enough time with my kids, my abilities as a programmer absolutely plummet. I wake up early and work, spend time with my toddler, then finish work while he naps and when his mom is home.

I had the opposite to the commenters above. I had the best ideas when attending to the baby, middle of the nights. I also started reading serious books (like geopolitical stuff) when my baby was falling asleep on my laps. I did some of my best and most efficient coding the first 3 months with the baby (when it was sleeping). I worked less, but better. My brain definitely shifted, I had an unparalleled motivation to do things. After 10 months it started to fade away and return to “normal”.

The only difference I noticed was that my brain didn’t work as well due to barely sleeping for months.

Based on the replies, I jokingly conclude that the increase in gray and white matter during these baby phases is to handle the cognitive dysfunction of sleep deprivation.

I wonder if sleep deprivation is related to raising children pre industrial era. It seems logical but I don't know much on this topic. :)

I just read Matthew Walkers book - Why We Sleep. It is probably a major factor in the changes.

Just watch the first few minutes of this.

https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpow...

I took three months off each time. I suspect I'd have been very sub-par in a work context as like others have mentioned, the overriding change was lack of sleep. We definitely felt zombie-like for some good proportion of that time. Perhaps the extra brain matter was trying to compensate for running on empty? :)

We organised with me as evening shift - so mum could get a little uninterrupted sleep, and she picked up the morning shift.

I became unbeatable at catching & resolving pages in the 'wish I was dead' hours (1am-5am) with our second. Hot tea & wrapped in a blanket trying to raise my body temperature out of the depths of the circadean rhythm downward cycle so my brain would switch from sleep to awake mode

I didn't notice any improvements work-wise, probably thanks to all the missed sleep

My kid doesn't nap and sleeps very short.

My productivity took a nose dive from the quite extreme sleep deprivation. Sleeping 3-4h for months is bad for your mind.

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