Society Values Babies. Not Children.

Just say the quiet part out loud.

Babies are (mostly) cute and sweet and do cute things and for multiple people in any given room with them, they represent a new hope and a new beginning. One of the most profound quotes I’ve ever seen in some bullshit modern digital newsletter was when Anne Helen Petersen wrote, “Every baby is part of a story a woman tells herself about who she is.” That’s not entirely true, because I’d reckon 40% of pregnancies are utter accidents (I think that’s mostly backed up by research, insofar as people are honest about accidental pregnancies), but it’s a good line.

But think about it: a baby is cute and sweet and fresh and coos and doesn’t talk back, and for a while (six to eight weeks at least), everyone wants to come and see the baby and there’s a lot of love and support. The parents are tired, but overjoyed in many ways. The grandparents have another thing to focus on. (Again, not in all families. Sometimes the grandparents are dead or utterly disengaged. I can’t hit this target perfectly because I cannot speak for 8 billion people.)

Babies are very cool and represent the culmination of a story, whether that’s how a woman and a man saw their life, or whether that’s a fertility journey, or whether that’s how a grandparent saw their retirement, etc, etc. Babies are the bomb dot com.

Teenagers? Now that’s a different story. Teenagers are sullen and unresponsive (again, not all) and go to their rooms and close the door and play video games or bully their female classmates or learn too much about PornHub and first-person shooters, and teenagers are regularly the source of “We’re having a lot of problems with Jason…” discussions at neighborhood dinner parties.

Jason was cute and cuddly and coo’ed back at people, but a decade and a half later, Jason is fucking annoying to those same people.