I hate it when people say shit like this so authoritatively. Like this is some conjecture at best. It’s a baby. No one knows why a baby does this. Someone assumed that and some other people said oh yeah that makes sense.
We interviewed 10,000 babies and the most common answer were:
giggle
cry
smile
shit themselves
It doesn’t really seem that hard to test? Emotions–at least in their occurrence and strength–are detectable with non-invasive brain scans. We’ve been doing that for ages. Put some electrodes on a baby, let them see their mommy, watch the graph spike until they turn away.
The argument “how could we know that about babies?” was used, for decades, to justify doing surgery on babies without anesthesia. They can’t talk, so who knows if they’re feeling pain or not. Guess we can safely assume they don’t. Point being, we don’t have to have a conversation with them about it to know why they’re doing something.
Oh yeah let me just plug in an fmri and find out if someone is definitively experiencing “joy”. That’s high level somewhat subjective emotion, not pain. Neurological understanding is not nearly as advanced as you think it is. I spent my post doc doing fmri research; the best thing you could come up with here is “areas of the brain associate with pleasure are highly activated” but even that doesn’t necessarily indicate the baby feels overwhelmed. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s some fancier neuroscientist out their that can read baby brains but I doubt it
Yeah baby please stand still for the brainscan… Or try to laugh while your head is restrained in a vise. Easy peasy
While I think scanning baby brains is not really viable for this (see my other reply) they actually do basically put babies in a restraint for X-rays and neurological scans that looks pretty fucked up. But I mean if a baby is having seizures or has a suspected broken bone you have to get imaging, even if it’s kind of cruel
!(https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5247993e-4362-4606-96c2-928b4ee7669a.jpeg)
!(https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3369d6b4-8c42-4899-b5a3-41bac83d8d66.jpeg)
It’s nicer to believe than my baby turned away because it’s tummy hurts from laughing at my face too much.
That sounds incredibly pulled out of someone’s ass.
Babies are the most adorable things that routinely ruin your sleep isolate you from your friends eat your entire wallet and reward you by making you personally clean all their literal shit.
And some how when they grow up all you can do is wish you had your adorable scrunchietato back
I think the lack of commas is a stylistic choice, the unceasing torrent of negative words relating to the frantic nature of parenthood, dealing with one thing after another without pause.
If it’s not, then that seems like quite a happy little accident!
I kinda was going for that just raising more and more and more problems until you run out of breath mid word kinda tone
And some how when they grow up all you can do is wish you had your adorable scrunchietato back
Speak for yourself, fam. Parenting has only gotten better as they age for me. Every year has been better than the last. Granted, they are 8 and 11 so things might change at some point soon. Lol
I miss very little about them being babies. It was a miserable time, a study even showed that the year after the birth of a first child is worse for happiness than the death of your spouse.
Actually it’s because they didn’t buy the premium emote as it was like a thousand V-Bucks.
Isn’t this woman some sort of religious fundamentalist?
She is religious, and writes opinion articles, so I wouldn’t take anything she says any more seriously than anything you read here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bruenig
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/elizabeth-bruenig/
This makes me think she’s probably not a fundie.