Full transparency: I have recommended these two books so many times that it is starting to become a whole thing. These are the books I would put in a welcome basket for every new family if I could.
Matrescence — Lucy Jones
The word itself: Matrescence. It was first named by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and it describes the process of becoming a parent through birth, the way adolescence describes the process of becoming an adult. And the fact that most of us have never even heard this word before is basically the entire point of this book.
Jones is a science journalist and she brings together neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and her own lived experience into something that reads as both a rigorous piece of research and an incredibly personal memoir. It is a lot, in the best possible way. The scope of it is almost wild to think about, and yet it never feels overwhelming because Jones writes with so much warmth and honesty that you just feel like you’re being let in on something huge.
Here’s one of the things that stopped me cold when I first read this book. Jones goes into the research on the maternal brain showing that pregnancy causes pronounced, lasting structural changes in areas linked to social cognition and caregiving. Researchers could look at a brain scan and tell whether or not that person had ever been pregnant.
Jones also dismantles the whole “mommy brain” narrative with real data, which I appreciated. The idea that becoming a parent makes you cognitively worse is not only wrong, it has roots in Victorian-era sexism.
Why I recommend this as a doula: So many of the new parents I support feel completely blindsided by how different they feel. Not just tired, but altered. Matrescence gives language and scientific legitimacy to that experience. It is one of the most validating things a birthing parent can read in those early weeks and months.
One note on language: the book is primarily written from the perspective of mothers, and Jones writes from her own experience as a woman.
Impossible Parenting — Olivia Scobie
If Matrescence is the book that explains what is happening inside a new parent’s brain and body, Impossible Parenting is the book that explains what is happening to them culturally and structurally, and what to actually do about it.
The central argument is right in the title: the standards we have created for parenting are not just high, they are impossible. The insight is that just naming them as impossible from the start is really freeing, because it stops the conversation from being about your personal failure and starts it being about a systemic problem.
The book is also just so readable. Scobie opens with her own early parenting experience, which was nothing like the Gilmore fantasy she’d pictured for herself, and that sets the tone: She’s warm and she clearly cares so much about the people she’s writing for.
Impossible Parenting is peppered with concrete exercises to deal with common challenges, and there’s a wonderful section on self-compassion that doesn’t tip over into toxic positivity, asking parents to hold themselves with the same care they would extend to anyone else who was going through something hard.
Why I recommend this as a doula: Impossible Parenting is one of the clearest, most compassionate explanations of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders I have read. Scobie covers PMADs with real depth and zero stigma.
The Two Together
Matrescence says: here’s what is actually happening to you, biologically and psychologically. Impossible Parenting says: the culture surrounding you is asking too much, and you are not failing it, it is failing you. Together they give you a picture of the postpartum period that is grounded in reality and makes room for new parents to be human.