I’ve been thinking of how weird human children and human childcare is. It’s pretty surprising to me that it’s so exhausting and unpleasant to raise children that fertility rates are plummeting (and that I myself was totally set against it for the first half of my fertile years before changing my mind for relatively abstract reasons).
Initially, my intuition was that it’s non-predetermined that children would be all three of (1) energetic, (2) insane, (3) emotionally needy, (4) emotionally volatile – that if you rolled a random sapient species 1000 times, humans would have top-quartile difficult children. But then it started seeming like at least three of those (in childhood) are strongly tied to sapience.
(Obvious counterexample: octopi)
I’m playing around with the idea that sapient life forms across the universe will converge onto “having been difficult to parent”, because sapient species will tend to need
- to gather an enormous amount of training data early in life, by experimenting a lot (⇒ energetic and insane)
- frequent feedback from adults (⇒ needy)
That said, the emotional volatility of children seems like it’s contingent. I find it hard to imagine an equally functional/sapient version of homo sapiens where children are ‘sensible’, but easy to imagine a version where they throw fewer tantrums.
Naively, if I had to guess what a generic sapient child would have to do to maximize social learning, it would involve a number of weird, extreme emotional strategies (e.g. tantrums). But human children do a small number of extreme emotional strategies over and over again.
My tentative belief is that human children’s emotional volatility is not tied to sapience (and is not well modeled as part of a learning strategy common in any sapient species) – it’s a holdover from our recent evolution from a species without language. I think chimps are emotionally volatile because in a very social species without language, communication often has to occur by doing in extreme, unmistakeable-for-other-signals actions.
But… I still don’t understand the fundamental reason human children have stronger emotions than adults. (Although some of my adult friends disagree that their emotions are weaker now – they just think their reactions are tempered by self control.)