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 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.