Empathy frequently informs our earliest days with our infants as we try to figure out what they need, how to comfort and satisfy them.

Motherhood is an especially powerful experience because it involves learning under high-stakes conditions, which is just the sort of learning that drives change in the brain.

There is no other time in a woman's life when she needs to be quite as smart as when she is looking after young children.

There are changes in the brain (during pregnancy and early motherhood) ? concrete, measurable changes, and later, the way we think and behave is changed.

You have to be able to slow down enough to switch your focus away from all the ways things could be better, to know how good they already are.