Aspie1 wrote:
I feel neutral about babies. They can be nice to look at sometimes, but they don't affect me in any way emotionally, either. I have a much bigger problem with the crying. Why does it have to be so irritating? Studies showed that babies cry with the volume of 80 decibels (dB), the same as a moving subway train. That's pretty staggering! Whenever I hear a baby crying in a public place, it annoys the sh*t out of me, and I find myself thinking: "Now where's a dose of melatonin (or NyQuil) when you need it? And why won't the parents just make the kid stop? How can they stand it?" It's one of the reasons why I never want to have kids. Two or more years of crying is just too much to bear.
Animal babies, such as little kittens and puppies, do affect me a little bit. I find watching them very comforting and relaxing. And their cries consist of quiet mews or whimpers, not an 80-dB wail. I think more people would be willing to have kids and like them a lot more, if human babies did that.
The crying is a distress signal, it's meant to be unbearable so that the mother will take proper care of her baby and do everything in her power to prevent crying. The crying tells you something is wrong and needs to be remedied. If it were less irritating, parents would just ignore it (although, amazingly, some still do!! !) and babies would not get their basic needs met properly. Unfortunately many people are too damn lazy and/or insensitive to take proper responsive care of their children, so they just let them cry or try to "make" them stop, or even worse, as you suggested, just dope them up with something.
From an evolutionary angle, babies who cry are more likely to get their needs met, whereas the so-called "good" babies who just lie there and don't demand care are more likely to experience neglect and failure-to-thrive.
P.S. The animal babies do not have much need to scream and cry, because their parents have not deviated from the natural continuum of care that evolution designed them to expect. Humans, on the other hand, have in the last couple of hundred years completely screwed up our birth and childcare practices to the point where in most industrialized/Western countries babies are barely getting any of their needs adequately met (from a natural/evolutionary perspective). They are separated from their mothers, fed artificial formula from an unresponsive plastic bottle, left lying in a crib alone all night, left lying around most of the day instead of toted in a sling or pack, and expected to accept toys and other blinking, flashing, musical objects as a substitute for the stimulation of human interaction. Babies are desperate and their cries reflect that. In more "primitive" cultures where mothers still give their babies the care their biology expects, they do not scream and cry the way they do here.