Learning something new as a mom: why it matters more than you think

About six months after my second child was born, I signed up for a pottery class.

Not because I had any particular aptitude for it or even strong interest. Because a friend was going, because it was on a Tuesday evening when my partner could be home and because I realised, sitting with a cup of tea that had gone cold for the third time that day, that I had not been a beginner at anything in years.

I was terrible at pottery. I am still fairly bad at it. But something happened in those two hours on Tuesday evenings that did not happen anywhere else in my week: I was occupied with something that required my full attention, I was allowed to get it wrong without consequence and I was doing something that belonged entirely to me and had nothing whatsoever to do with being anyone's mother.

What learning something new actually does for you

The benefits of adult learning tend to be framed in terms of cognitive health, and they are real in that sense. A 2014 study published in Psychological Science found that older adults who engaged in sustained learning of a new complex skill showed significant improvements in memory function compared to control groups engaged in passive leisure. The brain, it turns out, responds to genuine challenge with the kind of growth that familiarity does not produce.

But the benefits for mothers specifically are less about cognitive reserve and more about something the research describes as self-expansion. Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron, whose work on how close relationships grow through incorporating new experiences and perspectives, found that self-expansion, actively enlarging your sense of who you are and what you can do, is one of the primary drivers of both individual wellbeing and relationship vitality. The person who is learning something new is a person whose sense of self is expanding rather than contracting.

For mothers in the intensive caregiving years, this matters because the role of mother, for all its richness, tends to contract the self rather than expand it. The same competencies are drawn on daily. The same domains are navigated. The same person is fundamentally required. Learning something new introduces a version of yourself that does not exist in the caregiving context: the beginner, the striver, the person who is trying something she is not yet good at.

Why being a beginner is specifically valuable

There is something about beginner status that gets underrated in adult life, where most of what we do is in domains where we already have some competence.

Being a beginner means tolerating not knowing. It means accepting help. It means measuring progress against your own previous performance rather than against anyone else's established capability. It means the particular satisfaction of doing something slightly better than you did it last week, which is a different and in some ways more satisfying form of progress than the maintenance of existing skill.

Research on what psychologist Carol Dweck calls growth mindset, the belief that abilities are developed through effort rather than fixed at birth, consistently finds that people who engage in new learning experiences maintain higher psychological resilience than those who stay in domains of established competence. The act of learning something new reinforces the belief that change is possible and that you are capable of it. That belief matters considerably in a period of life that is asking you to change in every direction simultaneously.

What gets in the way

Not enough time. This is real and cannot be completely resolved by reframing. But the version of learning that requires two free evenings a week is not the only available format. An online course with fifteen-minute modules. A podcast that explores a new field. A book on something you know nothing about. A class that meets monthly rather than weekly. The shrunken version still counts.

Fear of being bad at something. Adults, particularly adults who derive their confidence from professional competence, find beginner status genuinely uncomfortable. The discomfort is worth pushing through, because it is precisely the discomfort of growth rather than maintenance.

Not knowing what to learn. The choice paralysis of too many options, combined with the uncertainty of what might actually interest you after years of not having much time for interests. Starting with what you are curious about, rather than what you think you should do, tends to produce more genuine engagement.

Some starting points worth considering

The content matters less than the commitment to the practice of learning itself. Whatever produces the experience of being absorbed in something new and trying to get better at it is the right choice.

What it gives your children

This is worth naming because the guilt about time spent on learning, as distinct from time spent with the children, is a common obstacle.

Children whose parents are visibly learning something, trying something they are not yet good at, talking about what interests them and what they are figuring out, absorb something about what adult life can look like. That the world is interesting. That you can be a beginner at something without it being a humiliation. That growth continues beyond childhood.

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Mahatma Gandhi

If the question of who you are outside of the mothering role feels genuinely hard to answer, how to feel like yourself again after kids approaches that retrieval from a wider angle. And if finding a specific interest to pursue, rather than learning in the abstract, is where the difficulty lies, finding a hobby as a mom: why it matters and where to start has a more practical starting point.

Sign up for something. You do not need to be good at it. You just need to start.

Further reading: Carol Dweck, Mindset: the new psychology of success (2006). Barbara Oakley, A mind for numbers: how to excel at maths and science (2014). Ken Robinson, The element: how finding your passion changes everything (2009).