Diaper Duty Dulls Parents' Disgust Response

Need to check for a dirty diaper? Just stick your nose right up in there, you’ll know it if you smell it.  I cannot count the number of times I have seen a parent launch their child into the air, take a good, long sniff of their diaper, and announce “Oh, it’s a stinky one!” with a laugh.

How do they do it? I can’t imagine braving the thousands of dirty diapers, runny noses and smelly cans of baby food that come alongside the joys of parenthood. Disgust doesn’t seem to exist for parents—and now, there’s science to prove it. Parenting dulls the brain’s disgust response

New research from the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology shows that months of exposure to dirty diapers and all things baby muffles the brain’s disgust response. The study involved a team of neuroscientists looking at how 99 parents and 50 non-parents responded to disgusting images, ranging from dirty diapers to adult vomit.

When shown images of dirty diapers, non-parents responded as you’d expect. They avoided looking at the ‘gross’ images, choosing instead to look at other, ‘neutral’ images. The responses of parents, in contrast, were quite surprising. Once their youngest child had begun eating solid food, parents spent just as much time looking at soiled diapers as they did looking at neutral images.

Parents' instinct to distance themselves from what our brains categorize as unhygienic was wiped away, researchers believe, by diaper duty. This is no small feat. Dr. Dalmaijer, one of the study’s authors, noted that disgust is a “deeply ingrained emotional response” that otherwise would have been very difficult to change. It didn’t matter the age or gender of the parents. Across the board, parents of weaned children had a dulled disgust response.

Diaper duty is a must

Sadly, no magic switch turns off disgust the moment someone becomes a parent. Parents of pre-weaning children didn’t show any less disgust avoidance than non-parents. If anything, their disgust avoidance was even stronger.

This also applied to multi-child parents. Having a baby was like a reset button: as long as their youngest child hadn’t started eating solid food, researchers found parents’ disgust avoidance intensified.

Desensitization only kicked in after the early months of changing diapers and cleaning spit-up had passed. According to the study, this is evidence that exposure to the more gross aspects of parenting is what dulled the parents’ disgust response.

Diaper duty was evenly split between all parents in the study, making full participation in parenting responsibilities a must for developing this parenting superpower.

Changes extend beyond parenting

The study found that parents of weaned children showed less disgust towards all of the ‘gross’ images they were shown, regardless of whether they were related to parenting. These included images of dirty toilets, adults vomiting and other revolting things that I’ll leave to the imagination.

“Parenthood doesn’t just change daily routines; it can fundamentally alter how humans experience disgust, with lasting effects that extend beyond childcare itself,” said Dr. Dalmaijer.

While we don’t know exactly why all of this happens, the researchers have a few theories. That annoying increase in disgust in parents of pre-weaning babies might just exist for an important reason: to help reduce their risk of getting sick. As children get older, the researchers believe that lowered disgust avoidance in parents might allow their kids to participate in all sorts of immune system-building activities.

Though these are just theories, I can’t help but find them comforting. If parenting reshapes the brain to prime us for the not-so-cute aspects of having a child, that means there’s hope. Even those of us who watch in wonder (and let’s be honest, a touch of disgust) as our peers take on the stinkiest challenges of parenting might one day surprise ourselves.