Stop calling it ‘mommy brain’ — scientists say the term is wrong and unfair to moms

Pregnancy brain, mommy brain, momnesia — our culture has learned to use the term to describe moms everywhere when they seem forgetful or scattered before and soon after giving birth.

But the idea that motherhood is in itself associated with a decline in cognitive abilities may be both wrong and unfair to moms and their brains, writes a team of scientists in an article released Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology.

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The few studies that have attempted to investigate whether mothers actually suffer from memory loss during pregnancy and in the postpartum period have failed to find significant differences in the abilities of women who have children compared with women without children, according to the new article’s authors, Dr. Clare McCormack, Dr. Bridget L. Callaghan and Dr. Jodi L. Pawluski.