exodus I’ve never found babies cute, I find them pretty alien and gross, and it’s not an uncommon response!
I haven’t listened to the episode yet but here is an anecdote about this, or, at least, about specifically newborns. One time my partner’s mother was telling me about how when she had my partner, she thought my partner was the cutest prettiest little baby in the whole world from day one. However, how she put it when she had my partner’s little brother and saw him as a newborn, was to get wide-eyed, shake her head, and say “…monster…”
Of course once he got a little older she thought he was adorable and he is a strapping young lad now, but I still laugh about that whenever I think about newborns.
exodus Folks will say “do you like kids” and it’s like… Do I like human beings? I’ve got to meet them one on one first.
Also I think this is the most reasonable position and also pretty in line with mine on the whole baby/kid thing. I don’t like kids or babies any more or less than I like grown people, which is to say, that on principle I love them all on a conceptual level but probably only want to hang out with only a relatively small subsection of even the ones I have personally encountered.
Well, however, kids are kind of a special category of people, in that they pretty universally experience a lot of complex vulnerabilities and challenges just ’cause that’s how human development works, especially these days when it hasn’t been worse for kids in the world maybe since the first factory owner figured out kids could reach or crawl into tight spaces better than adults (and you barely even had to pay ’em!), so I think all adults have a responsibility to protect and nurture children and treat them with respect to the best of their ability. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect anyone to go even a hair out of their way to do so, nor do I think it’s strange to take steps to prevent oneself from being put in that position as much as they feel is necessary. Kids are people in more senses than just an abstract one, people do all sorts of things to avoid having to interact with people they don’t want to interact with or people they have no business interacting with, and I don’t think kids are a special category of person in that respect at least. Never mind not having kids, I couldn’t care less about the cultural pressure to do so, just like, if you don’t want to hang out with kids I don’t think that’s strange.
Case in point, I’ve mentioned it on here in passing but I became an uncle relatively recently, my nephew is around ten months old. My mom facetimes the little guy at least once if not multiple times a day. She absolutely adores babies so she can’t get enough of this, but like, idk, the baby is just doing baby stuff. I don’t think he’s far enough along cognitively to recognize what facetiming really is, even. I could be wrong about that. He’s a cute little guy and of course I’d do anything for him because he’s my nephew, but like, in terms of us having a personal connection, we’ll see how that goes once he can beat Dark Souls (I’m kidding but you know what I mean).