I’m a girl too, and I’m 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I’m not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it’s not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.
Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure.
Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don’t think its a coincidence.
Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn’t for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.
I’m trans (assigned male at birth, female now) and can say that there’s not the same kind of pressure on young men to react well to babies and young children and take an interest in them. I happen to have a fairly strong caretaker/teacher/playful interaction drive where kids are concerned; it was often seen as a bit weird, although once people saw me establishing a rapport with a child, they’d usually re-sort me into the “exception” box.
Of course it’s not JUST a sex thing. That would make no sense, either in evolutionary terms or in terms of actual evidence (there are a lot of very loving fathers in the world). But I suspect that when we’re talking about random babies on the street, the tendency to go gaga over them is more than weakly a sex thing. I’ve met maybe 2 guys who do that, but maybe 25% of girls (this is a guesstimation). It probably varies more between individuals than between the genders, though. (Note: my mother tells me she also had a strong gaga-over-babies reflex when she was in her teens.)
Have you EVER had a warm fuzzy feeling looking at babies? Also, do you spend a lot of time with children? Do you have warm fuzzy feelings for friends’ and relatives’ babies? I see the same children every week when teaching them swimming lessons, and it’s probably the “making friends” part that makes me want to take them home at the end of the day.
A friend of mine has a three-year-old who is so cute that she looks like she walked out of an illustrated fairy tale. I met this three-year-old when she was one, and while she wasn’t precisely awful to look at then, she was definitely less cute than she is now and less cute than the bunny. Another friend of mine has a new baby, and while this baby is unprecedented for me in the sense that I can identify her as looking like her parents, she is not as cute as the bunny.
Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.
Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.
I guess I lump all of those in with “general tendency towards cuteness” since when I think “baby” I think of the whole experience: holding, feeding, changing, bouncing up and down, the first time they hold up their head, the first time you smile and they smile back… Visually, yeah, some bunnies can be cuter than some babies. If you had chosen different images, I might have agreed that the bunny was cuter.
Agreed that in some ways, three-year-olds are cuter than one-year-olds. All babies look about the same (except to their parents) and although they’re cute, from what I’ve their cuteness doesn’t vary as much. Whereas some three-year-olds are walk-out-of-a-fairy-tale cute and some, well, aren’t. (Again, except to their parents.)
I’m going to stop commenting about babies now because the I-want-a-baby-now thing is a preoccupation of mine that I doubt many people on this site share. (Not to mention inconvenient in our current society that strongly penalizes teen mothers.)
If the teen mother comment implies that you yourself are a teenager, I’d be interested in your source for saying you’re ‘right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids’. I can’t find stats on this because babies in general are one of the areas where internet searches create too much noise for easy research, but a friend who studied some social demography stuff once told me that fertility doesn’t peak until the 20s.
On the main topic, there’s a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response. But beyond that, I don’t think there would be strong selective pressure against a cuteness response that also encompassed baby animals. Farmers don’t seem to find the cuteness of lambs to be a barrier to killing them, after all. If I was making up just-so stories, I’d guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.
You could do some interesting studies on this, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if some subconscious effects of cuteness responses (whether direct physical correlates or side effects on future actions etc.) would link more to bunnies, while people felt they should claim that babies are cuter.
I am 19, and apparently I had a cached belief that 16 is the ideal age for childbirth. (I’ve tried to track down the source, and I think it’s from a novel I read a really, really long time ago, where a character was ‘legally too young, but biologically the ideal age for childbirth’.) A quick Google search suggested 25-35 years of age as the period of peak fertility. Which I did not know. And which makes me feel better about having to delay having kids until then.
On the main topic, there’s a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response.
No doubt. But in general, I think a LOT of people (especially females) will have had the personal experiences that lead them to think babies are cute. And I wouldn’t be surprised if mothers whose ‘cuteness’ instinctive response is lower would have more trouble raising children, no matter how good their intentions. (I have a very sad story about this, actually, but I’m saving it for a top-level post.)
If I was making up just-so stories, I’d guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.
This reminds me of the area of qualitative research (in nursing, but you can do it anywhere I assume.) You go out and interview a whole bunch of people (mothers with babies in this case) and ask them a lot of questions about the emotions they feel surrounding their child and how their warm fuzzy feelings affect the way they care for your child. Then you compile the results, pick out common trends, and you have some empirical evidence to justify your just-so stories. (Assuming that baby-cuteness serves the same purpose now as it did during our evolution, which I think is safe.)
As an aside, I really don’t have much of a cuteness response to animals. I occasionally feel guilty eating meat because of a top-down moral belief that they have some form of consciousness and ability to feel pain, but on a purely emotional level I doubt I would have any trouble killing and eating a rabbit.
If you’re not running on instincts then you might want to be particularly careful with your beliefs in this area...
Peak fertility is different that the optimal age for a first child. Fertility is much easier to measure (based simply on the probability of getting pregnant given an standard opportunity to do so) whereas the best age to have your first child is a ridiculously complicated calculation having to do with your values and goals plus: the current and future state of medicine, the current and future state of the economy, your current and future pool of partnering opportunities, and probably other stuff as well.
Azathoth (who doesn’t know about fertility medicine or transhumanism or the singularity yet, and was informed of the pill one or two “clock cycles” ago) probably thinks it is a good idea to be very fertile near the end of one’s period of fertility because it’s your last chance to have your last kid, even if the probability of birth defects is substantially higher.
In the modern democratic/industrialized environments, women don’t have replacement levels of children. This might be “good” if we’re all looking around and correctly determining that the population should be lower and 0,1, or 2 “really well raised” kids are better than 8 “poorly raised” kids. Alternatively, this might be “bad” if our parenting instincts are just going crazy in this environment. Like it could be that if/when we’re well informed 70 year olds who resist cognitive dissonance we might look back on current reproductive decisions with justifiable regret.
In the (justifiably controversial) book The Bell Curve, the authors claim that before the advent of SATs, merit-based scholarships, and a universal college expectation for smart people, society was different in many ways, including that people in college were more likely to have rich parents but otherwise had the same intelligence as everyone else, and also that higher IQ predicted early marriage, early parenthood, less divorce, and larger total family sizes. I have never been able to find something peer-reviewed to back their historical claims, but it’s one of those head scratchers that make me wonder sometimes about the larger socio-demographic picture and whether there is some kind of mass craziness going on with respect to family planning in WEIRD countries.
One more factor—I think people are less likely to have children (or many children) if they trust that larger social structures (private and/or public pensions and provisions for care) will support them when they get old.
I believe that WEIRD (and we probably drop the “white” because the meme definitely spreads to other races) cultures are unsustainable at present tech because the birth rate is too low.
The ‘younger the better’ belief is quite common. I assume that it’s because most people worrying about age and childrens are at the older end and thinking they should be younger, and so they project that backwards. Also it fits with some popular myths of ‘everyone used to have kids at 14’.
On the generalising from one example, I was actually addressing Alicorn’s original point. That babies are cute is pretty generally accepted, but I wouldn’t be able to guess how many people prefer bunnies.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there’s a ‘right response’ or because they simply mistake their own views.
I’m squeamish about killing animals, and mammals more than lizards etc., but I don’t think cute baby mammals would be harder to kill.
I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I’m guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there’s a ‘right response’ or because they simply mistake their own views.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark’s Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage—which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare—dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)
Same demographer friend (more accurately, ex-girlfriend who was studying social and economic history at the time) told me that illegitimacy varied a lot by region in the early modern period. If I recall correctly, there were Northern rural communities where the first child was typically born before marriage. Or maybe so soon after that the parents must have known the women would bear a child. This was because marriage was seen as marking when you set up house, rather than the start of sex, and because you wouldn’t fix a relationship until fertility/combatibility was clear. People may have become engaged and pledged to each other first, mind.
I’m a girl too, and I’m 22 (was 21 when I wrote the article) - I’m not sure if you categorize that as the biological age where I should be having babies, but it’s not just a sex thing, although that might factor in weakly somehow.
Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure. Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don’t think its a coincidence.
Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn’t for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.
I’m trans (assigned male at birth, female now) and can say that there’s not the same kind of pressure on young men to react well to babies and young children and take an interest in them. I happen to have a fairly strong caretaker/teacher/playful interaction drive where kids are concerned; it was often seen as a bit weird, although once people saw me establishing a rapport with a child, they’d usually re-sort me into the “exception” box.
Of course it’s not JUST a sex thing. That would make no sense, either in evolutionary terms or in terms of actual evidence (there are a lot of very loving fathers in the world). But I suspect that when we’re talking about random babies on the street, the tendency to go gaga over them is more than weakly a sex thing. I’ve met maybe 2 guys who do that, but maybe 25% of girls (this is a guesstimation). It probably varies more between individuals than between the genders, though. (Note: my mother tells me she also had a strong gaga-over-babies reflex when she was in her teens.)
Have you EVER had a warm fuzzy feeling looking at babies? Also, do you spend a lot of time with children? Do you have warm fuzzy feelings for friends’ and relatives’ babies? I see the same children every week when teaching them swimming lessons, and it’s probably the “making friends” part that makes me want to take them home at the end of the day.
A friend of mine has a three-year-old who is so cute that she looks like she walked out of an illustrated fairy tale. I met this three-year-old when she was one, and while she wasn’t precisely awful to look at then, she was definitely less cute than she is now and less cute than the bunny. Another friend of mine has a new baby, and while this baby is unprecedented for me in the sense that I can identify her as looking like her parents, she is not as cute as the bunny.
Note that I do like holding and interacting with babies. They are small and warm and have itty-bitty fingers and toes to play with and soft hair to pet. But visually, bunnies win.
I guess I lump all of those in with “general tendency towards cuteness” since when I think “baby” I think of the whole experience: holding, feeding, changing, bouncing up and down, the first time they hold up their head, the first time you smile and they smile back… Visually, yeah, some bunnies can be cuter than some babies. If you had chosen different images, I might have agreed that the bunny was cuter.
Agreed that in some ways, three-year-olds are cuter than one-year-olds. All babies look about the same (except to their parents) and although they’re cute, from what I’ve their cuteness doesn’t vary as much. Whereas some three-year-olds are walk-out-of-a-fairy-tale cute and some, well, aren’t. (Again, except to their parents.)
I’m going to stop commenting about babies now because the I-want-a-baby-now thing is a preoccupation of mine that I doubt many people on this site share. (Not to mention inconvenient in our current society that strongly penalizes teen mothers.)
If the teen mother comment implies that you yourself are a teenager, I’d be interested in your source for saying you’re ‘right at the age when, biologically speaking, I should be having kids’. I can’t find stats on this because babies in general are one of the areas where internet searches create too much noise for easy research, but a friend who studied some social demography stuff once told me that fertility doesn’t peak until the 20s.
On the main topic, there’s a big danger of generalising from one example: whether you find babies cute is likely to relate to a whole host of your personal experiences and feelings about babies as well as the instinctive cuteness response. But beyond that, I don’t think there would be strong selective pressure against a cuteness response that also encompassed baby animals. Farmers don’t seem to find the cuteness of lambs to be a barrier to killing them, after all. If I was making up just-so stories, I’d guess that cuteness serves to get attention, increase patience and prevent boredom during childcare, rather than to make us want to look after them.
You could do some interesting studies on this, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if some subconscious effects of cuteness responses (whether direct physical correlates or side effects on future actions etc.) would link more to bunnies, while people felt they should claim that babies are cuter.
I am 19, and apparently I had a cached belief that 16 is the ideal age for childbirth. (I’ve tried to track down the source, and I think it’s from a novel I read a really, really long time ago, where a character was ‘legally too young, but biologically the ideal age for childbirth’.) A quick Google search suggested 25-35 years of age as the period of peak fertility. Which I did not know. And which makes me feel better about having to delay having kids until then.
No doubt. But in general, I think a LOT of people (especially females) will have had the personal experiences that lead them to think babies are cute. And I wouldn’t be surprised if mothers whose ‘cuteness’ instinctive response is lower would have more trouble raising children, no matter how good their intentions. (I have a very sad story about this, actually, but I’m saving it for a top-level post.)
This reminds me of the area of qualitative research (in nursing, but you can do it anywhere I assume.) You go out and interview a whole bunch of people (mothers with babies in this case) and ask them a lot of questions about the emotions they feel surrounding their child and how their warm fuzzy feelings affect the way they care for your child. Then you compile the results, pick out common trends, and you have some empirical evidence to justify your just-so stories. (Assuming that baby-cuteness serves the same purpose now as it did during our evolution, which I think is safe.)
As an aside, I really don’t have much of a cuteness response to animals. I occasionally feel guilty eating meat because of a top-down moral belief that they have some form of consciousness and ability to feel pain, but on a purely emotional level I doubt I would have any trouble killing and eating a rabbit.
If you’re not running on instincts then you might want to be particularly careful with your beliefs in this area...
Peak fertility is different that the optimal age for a first child. Fertility is much easier to measure (based simply on the probability of getting pregnant given an standard opportunity to do so) whereas the best age to have your first child is a ridiculously complicated calculation having to do with your values and goals plus: the current and future state of medicine, the current and future state of the economy, your current and future pool of partnering opportunities, and probably other stuff as well.
Azathoth (who doesn’t know about fertility medicine or transhumanism or the singularity yet, and was informed of the pill one or two “clock cycles” ago) probably thinks it is a good idea to be very fertile near the end of one’s period of fertility because it’s your last chance to have your last kid, even if the probability of birth defects is substantially higher.
In the modern democratic/industrialized environments, women don’t have replacement levels of children. This might be “good” if we’re all looking around and correctly determining that the population should be lower and 0,1, or 2 “really well raised” kids are better than 8 “poorly raised” kids. Alternatively, this might be “bad” if our parenting instincts are just going crazy in this environment. Like it could be that if/when we’re well informed 70 year olds who resist cognitive dissonance we might look back on current reproductive decisions with justifiable regret.
In the (justifiably controversial) book The Bell Curve, the authors claim that before the advent of SATs, merit-based scholarships, and a universal college expectation for smart people, society was different in many ways, including that people in college were more likely to have rich parents but otherwise had the same intelligence as everyone else, and also that higher IQ predicted early marriage, early parenthood, less divorce, and larger total family sizes. I have never been able to find something peer-reviewed to back their historical claims, but it’s one of those head scratchers that make me wonder sometimes about the larger socio-demographic picture and whether there is some kind of mass craziness going on with respect to family planning in WEIRD countries.
One more factor—I think people are less likely to have children (or many children) if they trust that larger social structures (private and/or public pensions and provisions for care) will support them when they get old.
I believe that WEIRD (and we probably drop the “white” because the meme definitely spreads to other races) cultures are unsustainable at present tech because the birth rate is too low.
The ‘younger the better’ belief is quite common. I assume that it’s because most people worrying about age and childrens are at the older end and thinking they should be younger, and so they project that backwards. Also it fits with some popular myths of ‘everyone used to have kids at 14’.
On the generalising from one example, I was actually addressing Alicorn’s original point. That babies are cute is pretty generally accepted, but I wouldn’t be able to guess how many people prefer bunnies.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there’s a ‘right response’ or because they simply mistake their own views.
I’m squeamish about killing animals, and mammals more than lizards etc., but I don’t think cute baby mammals would be harder to kill.
I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I’m guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark’s Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage—which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare—dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)
Same demographer friend (more accurately, ex-girlfriend who was studying social and economic history at the time) told me that illegitimacy varied a lot by region in the early modern period. If I recall correctly, there were Northern rural communities where the first child was typically born before marriage. Or maybe so soon after that the parents must have known the women would bear a child. This was because marriage was seen as marking when you set up house, rather than the start of sex, and because you wouldn’t fix a relationship until fertility/combatibility was clear. People may have become engaged and pledged to each other first, mind.