March 04, 2026
My twin boys are about one. I love them a great deal, but not in a way that hinges on seeing myself in them. In fact, they’re remarkably different: from each other, from me and Emily, and from grownups in general. After spending so much time in the company of babies, I’m struck by a couple thoughts.
While babies have a marvelous sweetness and innocence, they also abound with traits we would consider terrible in any grownup: jealousy, solipsism, profound selfishness, insanely short fuses. (I understand the toddler years won’t be much better.) None of this by way of judgment; these are just the factory settings! And if those are an arbitrary person’s factory settings, it follows that a person’s default state is not good. Generosity, compassion, bravery, selflessness: we don’t get these for free. We must learn and cultivate them. Becoming good, then, is a project of nurture, not nature. Spending time with babies underlines what a colossal accomplishment it is to become a grownup.
These factory settings underline why the deepest love must be unconditional, not earned by good behavior. This is obvious for babies, but I suspect it generalizes. We must not condemn each other overmuch for failures to be good. Such failures are the norm, the default, the baseline rather than the exception. What is exceptional is to be good: to be a grownup. All of us occasionally lapse and return to baseline; when we do, we, like babies, are still worthy of love.
Perhaps this is where some of a parent’s deep love comes from: seeing their child, seeing ordinary age-appropriate behaviors, and realizing what a tremendous amount of growth they already represent. (“My child shared!”) Of course, it’s theoretically possible to see all people this way, not just one’s own children. Insofar as kids teach you that every person is a baby—helpless, innocent, incapable of grownup goodness—who somehow grew and developed into someone who’s flawed but often good, they teach you to give people a whole lot more credit.
One more way babies cultivate compassion: they strike such a contrast with the hardness of the world. We create these gentle coccoon worlds for them, full of love and tenderness and care, all the while knowing that we must someday turn them out into the world. We look at the way the world treats some people, remember that they were babies too, and despair. It’s made me resent the hardness of the world more. It’s even nudged me to think harder about my own ethics: if the world must be this way, must I take part in it? For the first time, I’m engaging in real charity; I’m thinking much harder about eating meat; I sense I too am growing in some way I’m still figuring out.