Want to Change Your Personality? Have a Baby.
I knew that becoming a parent would change me—but I had no idea how.
Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott
In the spring of 2022, I was 36 years old and jumping up and down in my bathroom, trying to figure out my future. I had ordered a fertility test online that said it would provide fast results with just a few drops of blood. The videos on the company’s website featured a smiling blond woman jumping—to stimulate blood flow, naturally—and then effortlessly dribbling blood from her fingertips all over a little strip of test paper. All I had to do was be like her. Joyful. Sanguineous. Fertile.
For years, my husband, Rich, and I had gingerly walked the prime meridian between wanting and not wanting kids, usually leaning toward the “no” side. Having a baby had seemed unaffordable and impossible. On days when I finished work at 8 p.m., the thought of procreating made me laugh, then shudder.
Recently, though, I’d begun to reconsider. I was in the midst of an admittedly strange-sounding project: I was spending a year trying to change my personality. According to a scientific personality test I’d taken, I scored sky-high on neuroticism, a trait associated with anxiety and depression, and low on agreeableness and extroversion. I lived in a constant, clenched state of dread, and it was poisoning my life. My therapist had stopped laughing at my jokes.
But I had read some scientific research suggesting that you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. Several studies show that people who want to be, say, less isolated or less anxious can make a habit of socializing, meditating, or journaling. Eventually these habits will come naturally, knitting together to form new traits.
[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]
I knew that becoming a parent had the potential to change me in even more profound ways. But I had no idea how. My own mother once said to me, “I can’t picture you as a mother.” The truth was, neither could I.
I wasn’t sure I could get pregnant, even if I wanted to. My age put me in a category that was, in a less delicate time, called “geriatric” for pregnancy, and one doctor told me my eggs were probably of “poor quality.” The fertility test I’d ordered was meant to determine if those eggs were serviceable. In the bathroom, I unwrapped the glossy white box. The instructions said the test would take 20 minutes and require a pack of lancets. I grabbed one and stabbed it into my geriatric forefinger. Two hours, five lancets, and a graveyard of gauze and alcohol wipes later, I still hadn’t squeezed a single droplet out of my finger. Was I not jumping high enough? Was I already failing as a mother?
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to have a baby. I was also scared to death of having one.
Arguably, many things are wrong with me. I was raised by Russian immigrants who constantly worried that the “dark day” was upon us, so hopeful thoughts about the future of humanity don’t come naturally. I’m not a person who is affected by cuteness. I’ve never liked holding—or even really looking at—other people’s babies. I don’t like animals. I couldn’t imagine cooing and smiling at a baby as much as science says you’re supposed to for their brain development.
My neuroticism made it especially hard to decide if I wanted kids, because no process is more rife with uncertainty than parenting, and nothing scares anxious people more than uncertainty. I worried that Rich and I would fight more, and that our relationship would suffer. I worried about sleep deprivation. I felt torn between my lifelong conviction that people shouldn’t create problems for themselves and my (apparent) desire to do just that.
I would wake up in the middle of the night and Google things like percent miscarriage pregnant while 36? ; anxiety pregnancy miscarriage causes; Diet Coke fetal defects; pregnancy brain stops working hands stop working. These searches surfaced horrific anecdotes, but never any conclusive answers about what I should do. One time, I Googled reasons to have kids and found an article that labeled all the reasons I had come up with—like being cared for in old age and having someone who loves me—with the heading “Not-So-Good Reasons to Have Children.”
But then I would remember the times we visited Rich’s mom, who had dementia, in her nursing home. Her face lit up at the sight of him. “My son, my son, my only son,” she’d say, grabbing his arm. He was the only person she still recognized. The visits were a reminder that the people who matter most at the end are your children. The readers of your blog posts won’t make the trip.
Heather Rackin, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, found in a study that the death of a mother or sibling increased the likelihood that a woman would give birth within two years. The proximity of death is, perhaps, a wake-up call. Who will remember us? The study was based on Rackin’s personal experience: When her father died in 2017, she decided not to wait any longer to have kids. His death got her thinking, she told me, about what was important in life: the experience of being loved and the chance to provide that love for someone else. Her first child was born in 2019.
There are many reasons to postpone or avoid having children—the cost, the responsibility, the existence of and use case for the NoseFrida. But in addition to the practical challenges, a narrative has taken hold: Everything changes when you become a mother.
Once they reach their 30s, many people have carefully cultivated friend groups and sourdough starters and five-year plans. They “really have a good sense of who they are, and then having a baby totally disrupts everything that they thought they knew about themselves,” says Lauren Ratliff, a perinatal therapist in Illinois. Of course, this is where I differ from the rest of my cohort. By the time I was ready to have a baby, I’d already been trying to disrupt everything about myself.
For my personality-change project, I had experimented with science-backed strategies to turn down my neuroticism and amp up my extroversion and agreeableness. I had spent hundreds of hours trying out different iterations of mindfulness, culminating in a day-long meditation retreat that almost killed me with boredom but somehow alleviated my depression. Among other agreeableness-boosting activities, I traveled to London for a “conversation workshop,” where I learned techniques that can make even British people show an emotion. And to become more extroverted, I went out as much as humanly possible. I played table tennis. I did improv, and survived.
For the most part, my efforts worked: I no longer thought of talking with people as a waste of time. I became less afraid of uncertainty and disappointment. I made one very good new friend. I drank less.
I had been changing, but it was a type of change that I directly determined. I could go to happy hour, or not. I could meditate, or stop. I was aware that parenthood would transform me further, but what I found unsettling was that I couldn’t know exactly how. Bizarrely, for the biggest disruption of your life, study after study shows there’s no “typical” way that becoming a parent changes your personality. Some studies have found tiny average decreases in extroversion or openness among new parents—but even those findings aren’t consistent.
Despite my progress, I was still too neurotic to feel comfortable surrendering control and letting biology mold me into someone I couldn’t predict and might not recognize.
After doctors pronounced me insufficiently fertile, Rich and I decided to just stop being careful one month and see what happened. We figured we would at least have some fun before we embarked on our arduous “fertility journey.”
A short time later, on a choppy boat tour in Europe, I couldn’t stop leaning over the edge of the catamaran and hurling.
“Do you think you might be pregnant?” Rich whispered as the boat crew force-fed me pita bread.
“Don’t be insane,” I said. Everyone knows that 37-year-olds—especially infertile ones—don’t get pregnant on their first try.
A week after that, I found out that I had indeed gotten pregnant on my first try.
Being pregnant means having your brain replaced with an anxiety T-shirt cannon. I didn’t feel glowy or goddessy; I felt crazy. None of my friends has kids, and many of them reacted to my news like I’d gotten a face tattoo. One sent me a TikTok of everything that can supposedly go wrong in pregnancy, including the possibility that vomit will come out of your eyes. (It won’t.) I spent more and more time by myself, obsessing over which swaddles were best. (We didn’t end up using any.)
Thanks to a king tide of hormones, irritability spikes during the first and last trimesters of pregnancy. People say your baby will remember the sounds they hear in the womb, but I fear mine detected little in there other than me screaming at his father. Every few weeks, something would set me off, at a deafening volume. If they’d overheard me, those couples therapists who say contempt is the most glaring sign of a failed relationship would probably have advised us to start divvying up our furniture.
[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]
Sometimes when I was yelling, being so mean felt amazing—as though I’d finally engulfed Rich in my distress. Obviously you need a travel stroller and a regular stroller! I always apologized, and Rich always accepted my apology. But one time he said, “You know that with a kid, that’s not really something you can take back, right?” Sometimes, late at night, after yet another argument, I would rotate my spheroid belly toward Rich and ask, “What if I turn out to be a bad mother?”
The rest of the pregnancy was horrible. I didn’t think it was possible to feel so tired and still be technically alive. At my baby shower, when some friends asked me how I was feeling, I quoted the Russian dissident Boris Nadezhdin responding to a question about whether he feared imprisonment or death: “The tastiest and the sweetest years of my life are already in the past.” (This is the closest Russians get to excited.)
Three weeks before my due date, after a routine ultrasound, my high-risk ob-gyn walked briskly into the room. She looked around for something to sit on and, finding nothing, plopped down on top of a closed trash can. She told me that something was wrong with my placenta, and that the baby was in danger. And that I should now walk over to the delivery wing of the hospital.
In the antechamber of the operating room, I hyperventilated in my paper gown and tapped out emails to all my sources and bosses: I’m having an emergency C-section today, so I won’t be available for the next few months. My last day of caring whether people were mad at me.
Afterward, while the medical residents were rearranging my innards, I thought I heard one of them ask me something.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on down there at all,” I said across the blue curtain.
“That’s … probably for the best,” the resident said.
He came out with white hair, a perfectly round face, and a grumpy expression, like the leader of a former Yugoslav republic. I called him “Slobodan” a couple of times, until Rich told me to stop.
Because he was early, we panic-picked a name from our shortlist—Evan. The same day he was born, doctors whisked him away to the NICU; I saw him only a few times before we were all sent home days later. My discharge paperwork said, “Mom is breastfeeding four or five times a day,” which was funny because at that point I had not done it successfully even once. It was also funny because I—quite possibly the least qualified person for the job—was apparently “Mom.”
Once home, we entered the period we now refer to as “Cute Abu Ghraib.” Sleep deprivation addled me to the point that, on a call with the pediatrician, I forgot the baby’s name. When Evan was two weeks old, I bit into a piece of chicken and tasted something bloody and sharp. I had ground my teeth so hard during his NICU stay that I’d loosened a crown.
We agonized over whether the gyrations of the SNOO Smart Sleeper Bassinet would rattle his brain too much, then grew too exhausted to care. I became the CEO of Baby Inc., and Rich was employee No. 1; we communicated only about ointments and ounces. I finally had the big boobs of my dreams, but the only man who saw them was two feet tall and couldn’t read.
But then something interrupted the misery. One night, I was holding Evan while he was sleeping. I had read that singing to your baby was beneficial, so I decided to serenade him with one of the few songs I know by heart: “Forever and Ever, Amen,” by Randy Travis. Except I couldn’t seem to get through the fourth line: “This love that I feel for you always will be.” I, a bad bitch who has never cried at a wedding, kept choking up.
Rich asked me if I was okay.
“Whatever!” I said, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Shut up!”
I thought motherhood would be a forced march through inert babyhood and feral toddler years before we finally reached the golden time of my imagination: having a talking, precocious elementary schooler. But there I was, flooded with adoration for someone who barely registered my presence. I’d hated being pregnant, so I thought I would hate having a baby, too. But I loved him. I loved this.
Recall the research showing there’s no one way that parenthood tends to change people’s personalities. Anecdotally, researchers told me that they do notice certain patterns among new parents. Most moms worry about their kid, more or less constantly, from the minute they find out they’re pregnant. “Signing up to be a parent is signing up to have a lifetime of some degree of depression and anxiety,” Ratliff, the therapist, told me.
[Olga Khazan: Why it’s so hard to know what to do with your baby]
New parents’ satisfaction with their romantic relationship goes down, especially for mothers, and especially in the first year. “Guilt is another universal,” says Aurélie Athan, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who researches the transition known as “matrescence.” The creeping sense that you should be with your kid while you’re working and working while you’re with your kid apparently never goes away.
She told me that mothers become more attuned and prosocial—more caring and empathetic toward others. Athan said this is why so many mothers cry when their babies cry and have a hard time watching gory movies. “Moms get a really bad taste in their mouth with violent television or looking at images of war,” she said.
That’s where she lost me. My son had colic; for the first four months, he screamed like the possessed unless he was within the jiggly confines of his SNOO. The doula we hired referred to him, alternately, as “Mr. Cheeks,” “Mr. Crab,” and, sarcastically, “Mr. Wonderful.” If I had cried every time he cried, I wouldn’t have had time to do anything else.
Eventually, Rich and I grew desensitized, or felt like we had to match his chaotic energy with equally intense stimuli. One night, after Evan wailed in our ears for two hours, we shuffled downstairs and collapsed onto the couch. There was only one thing we could think to watch that would serve as a comedown from what had just happened: Saving Private Ryan.
“Did you remember to sterilize the pump parts?” I asked Rich as the entrails of American soldiers spilled out over the beaches of Normandy.
“The sterilizer thing broke, so I had to reset it,” he said as a man stumbled around with his arm blown off.
Even within these supposedly universal rules of parenthood, that is, there’s a lot of variability. That’s because life events like parenthood seem to change everyone differently, and how you’ll change is, in part, up to you. For a recent study, Ted Schwaba, a psychologist at Michigan State University, and his co-authors asked thousands of Dutch people about a life event in the past 10 years, such as a divorce or a new job, that they felt had changed who they were as a person. About 7 percent of the participants identified parenthood as the event that changed them, and on average, they felt that it had made them slightly more agreeable and conscientious.
But the big takeaway for Schwaba, from looking at all the data for all the different types of life events, was that there really was no pattern. Some people became more extroverted when they got a new job. Some became less so. Some people actually became less neurotic—that is, less depressed and anxious—after, say, a cancer diagnosis.
To Schwaba, this research suggests that it’s how you experience an event such as parenthood, more than the event itself, that determines how you’ll change. “The same event, like getting divorced, might be someone’s worst thing that’s ever happened to them, and for someone else, it might be the best thing that’s ever happened to them,” he told me.
Or your personality might change not immediately after an event like childbirth, but through a long process that the event sets in motion. It’s not the cry you hear in the delivery room that changes you; it’s the many years of researching child care and soothing boo-boos that gradually turn you into someone new. To change, you have to take steps every day to do so. Having a baby won’t make you a better person. Behaving like a better person for your baby will.
Of all the things I wanted motherhood to change about me, neuroticism was high on the list. Before I had Evan, I felt like I was personally responsible for making life unfold perfectly, and whenever I “failed” to do so, I had a meltdown. One day a few years ago, I got a bad haircut, got stuck in traffic, and had professional photos taken that looked terrible. My response to this—what my new-parent eyes now see as an 8-out-of-10 day—was to chug half a bottle of wine and scream to my husband through sobs, “I hate everyone and everything!”
[Olga Khazan: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]
But now so much goes wrong every single day that there’s no time to get upset about any one thing. I recently took a flight with Evan by myself, an exercise that really underscores the first Noble Truth of Buddhism (life is suffering). As I hauled the car seat, the stroller, the baby, the diaper bag, and the trendy, impractical tote from my childless years to the TSA line, an airline attendant took one look at me and said, “I know; it is too much.”
In the middle of the flight, I noticed that the two bottles of formula Evan nervously drank during takeoff had caught up with him, and that he was now soaked with pee. I grabbed him under the armpits and scooted across the seats to change him in the airplane’s postage-stamp-size bathroom. With one hand, I held him, crying, on the changing table, and with the other, I dug a clean onesie out of the bottom of the diaper bag. I fastened a million tiny onesie buttons. Then I saw that I had misaligned them and fastened them again. Next it was my turn. I couldn’t leave him on the changing table, or put him on the disgusting floor. I yanked my leggings down and held him at arm’s length as I peed.
By the end of that ordeal, I felt accomplished and capable. I didn’t feel like sobbing; I felt like high-fiving myself. I’ve let go in other ways, too. I show up at important meetings without makeup on. I say weird stuff to strangers and don’t analyze it obsessively later. Evan has forced me to step outside myself, to break from the relentless self-focus that has contributed to both my success and my unhappiness.
My remaining neuroses are laser-directed on his well-being. I had initially planned not to breastfeed, but once I started, I got so into it that when a doctor suggested that Evan would spit up less if I cut food allergens from my diet, I stopped eating virtually anything but oats and spinach for months. When I was pregnant, we’d signed the unborn Evan up for day care, but as the end of my maternity leave loomed, I embarked on a frantic search for a nanny so he could stay close to me while I worked from home. I had always mentally mocked parents who checked to be sure their babies were still breathing at night, then found myself standing in front of his crib at 3 a.m., feeling for puffs of air from two tiny nostrils.
I yell at Rich less than I used to, because not only is he employee No. 1 of Baby Inc., but he’s the only employee, and frankly there are no other applicants for the job. In fact, the whole experience has made me kinder and more tender, like the Grinch, post–heart enlargement. I’m less worried about wasting time, because all time with a baby is essentially wasted—the most important nothing you’ll ever do in your life. I even love Evan’s wet, violent “kisses,” which leave his baby-teeth imprints on our jaws. When my friend Anton visited recently, he watched me make horsey noises for Evan for what probably felt like hours. “I can’t believe you love an infant!” he said.
During my interview with Ratliff, I told her that Evan had lately been losing interest in breastfeeding. I had awaited this day through months of bleeding nipples and frustration, but now that it was here, it was making me a bit sad. “Your baby’s moving to the next stage,” she affirmed, “and this one is not going to come back again.” I started tearing up—both at the memory of those bleary, milk-soaked months together and at the realization that he wouldn’t even be a baby for much longer.
During my personality-change experiment, my meditation teacher had tried to hammer home the idea that “this too shall pass” is both uplifting and sad: Nothing bad lasts forever, but neither does anything good. Before I had Evan, I was focused on impermanence’s upsides: This uncomfortable improv show will end; this awful pregnancy will too. But now I’m more keenly aware of its downsides. The sleepless nights will end, but so too will the times Evan squeals at a game of peekaboo, or spends an entire swim class gazing up at me in awe. Every day brings a sigh of relief and a pang of nostalgia. Having someone who loves you, I’ve decided, is a good reason to have kids.
This essay was adapted from Olga Khazan’s forthcoming book, Me, but Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Who’s Your Mommy?”
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