As we've mentioned many times, everything in psychology has a bio-psycho-social explanation. To find out why babies are so cute, we must turn to evolution. Evolution's involvement in cuteness is two-fold. First, babies are genetically programmed to be particularly "cute" at a young age. This developed as a defense mechanism for babies against those dreadful beasts called parents, older siblings, and other humans. The innate cuteness of babies is just one factor in the defense mechanism. On top of that, the "predators" need to find the baby cute, which will make them want to take care of the baby rather than hurt it. We always say that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. In this case, it couldn't be more applicable. Biologically, babies have large eyes, small noses and mouths. Socially, we have been taught to find a baby's coos and faces extremely cute.
Now that we understand the basics of baby cuteness, let's put these principles into practice. Imagine your baby (or little sibling, if you want to imagine that) wakes up at midnight, crying hysterically. You haven't gotten any sleep and you know that the baby won't be asleep until at least 2 A.M. You take the baby out of the crib and try to soothe the crying, but you're exhausted and your patience is wearing thin. When I say it's wearing then, I mean it's wearing EXTREMELY thin to the point that you don't even care if the baby keeps crying or not. Then you look down at the baby and you see the cutest face ever. Instead of doing something mean and irresponsible, you decide to take care of the baby until it goes back to sleep.
In the end, the baby "effortlessly" survived, as if there was no trouble at all. Well done babies!
"Who, me?"
I love this blog post, Sarah. Cute babies are so cute! (there really is no other word to describe them) Over Shabbos, my family was talking about an incident where a young boy, probably around 5, fell into a gorilla exhibit at a zoo and became unconscious. One gorilla started to get angry and was jumping around, and just before it started messing with the child, another gorilla came and fought off the first gorilla and then took the child in its arms and tried to help it. I don't know whether this had to do with the cuteness of the child, but who knows? Maybe motherly gorillas love cute children.
ReplyDeleteI remember talking about this at some point in my school career as a way of marveling at how perfectly G-d set up the world. Like you said, taking care of an infant puts tremendous strain on a parent. G-d created babies in a way that makes us want to take care of their needs. It's hard to imagine how we might treat a baby differently if it wasn't cute.
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