Wretched Children

Is the first year of life miserable?

From Dall-E 3: I forget the prompt I used

When exploring certain deep questions about morality—concerning cruelty, fate, and difficult trade-offs—the suffering of babies and children often comes up. Here is the philosopher Derek Parfit introducing the Wretched Child:

The Wretched Child. Some woman knows that, if she has a child, he will be so multiply diseased that his life will be worse than nothing. He will never develop, will live for only a few years, and will suffer pain that cannot be relieved.

Ursula Le Guin presented another case in her classic short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. I’ll put a trigger warning here¹—this is grim and detailed, and you might want to skim it or skip it.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

Le Guin depicts the city of Omelas as a paradise, a wonderful place to live for just about everyone. There is just one catch—all of this happiness and fulfillment is at the expense of this single suffering child. If it is rescued, Omelas becomes like every other city.

This can be seen as a dramatic illustration of the limits of utilitarianism—roughly, the view that the best action is the one that leads to the greatest good for the greatest number. From the utilitarian perspective, Omelas is terrific. Real cities have countless people, including children, who are tortured and abused, suffer from agonizing diseases, and live horrific lives. If you do the math, Omelas is the clear winner—the suffering of the one child in the room is more than offset by the benefits to everyone else. It’s much better overall than the real cities I’ve lived in when I assigned the story to my students—Tucson, New Haven, and Toronto.

Yet, for many, the situation in Omelas is immoral, even grotesque. Like the characters in the story, many of my students would find it unbearable and walk away from Omelas.

Here is Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov asking a similar question.

“… Tell me honestly, I challenge you – answer me: imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, whose ultimate aim is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her breast with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice has to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!”

“No, I wouldn’t agree,” said Alyosha quietly.

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Thinking about these examples brought me back to a question that has often occupied me: What’s it like to be a baby? Not a tortured baby, real or imaginary, but just your average run-of-the-mill baby, the sort we all once were.

I wrote about this years ago as part of a review of Alison Gopnik’s book, The Philosophical Baby.

Gopnik … argues that babies are more conscious than adults. Her conclusion is based on the study of how attention and inhibition—the capacity to block out distractions—evolve over the course of development. Adult attention is willful and endogenous. Although it can be captured by external events—we will turn if we hear a loud noise—we also have control over what to think about and what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to focus on our left foot, then think about what we had for breakfast, then focus on … whatever we want. Adults are also blessed, to varying degrees, with the power to ignore distractions, both external and internal, and to stay focused on a single task.

This is all harder for babies and young children. They are largely at the mercy of the environment. Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what’s going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it’s like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is.

Put differently, there is a purity to babies’ mental lives. Adult thought is layered; we don’t just think, we think about what we’re thinking; we connect our experiences to the past and present; we are conscious of ourselves as experiencing beings. Babies have none of this. Whatever happens to them is all-encompassing, filling their heads with no means of escape.

While writing this post, I spent more time than I should watching videos of babies crying and laughing, like these:

These videos left me…confused. Sometimes, it looks like these are the most intense emotions a person can feel—pure anguish and pure joy. Nobody in the world is more miserable than a wailing baby, and nobody is happier than a laughing one.

But sometimes, I got the opposite feeling. Some of these clips are just weird. Babies don’t laugh and cry like adults do, and the sounds they make can be almost inhuman. Their laughing sounds mechanical; their cries are like the shrieks of broken machinery. (Evolution has wired us to react to the wailing of a baby with distress, and this usually motivates care for the baby—though for an exhausted parent, it can sometimes lead to a desire to escape or, worse, rage.)

And their reactions are so short-lived. They lack resonance. How bad could a baby be feeling if its tears are so quickly soothed?

As a final twist that I can’t explain, baby cries are seen as adorable in a way that adult cries certainly are not. Only a sadist would watch several minutes of adults bursting into tears, but when a baby wails, it can be, as they put it in the title of the YouTube video, “Cute and Funny.”

(This can go too far, though. There is something disturbing in the second video, just 5 seconds in—a paddle covered in something like whipped cream smacks a baby in the face, and the woman holding him just about passes out in laughter. I get that cruelty can sometimes be funny, but this was a bit much for me.)

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What does it feel like to be one of these babies? I began my review of Gopnik’s book with this.

Alison Gopnik writes that developmental psychologist John Flavell once told her that he would give up all his degrees and honors for just five minutes in the head of a 2-year-old. I would give up a month of my life for those five minutes—and two months for five minutes as an infant.

I still would.

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Let’s move to a more tractable question about babies’ mental lives: On average, are babies happy? Is there more pleasure or pain?

In Life is Good, posted a few weeks ago, I explored a similar question for adults. One method to explore this is “experience sampling.” This can be used to assess the average pleasure and pain of an individual’s life by asking a question like “How are you feeling, from a scale of 1 to 10?” at random times and averaging out the answers. Numerous studies, asking the question in different ways, find that the moments of an average person’s life (or at least the average person participating in a psychological study) are, for the most part, pleasurable. Life is good!

Of course, you can’t get babies to answer questions. But they do express their feelings—more openly than adults, actually, who can hold back tears or suppress their smiles (and even sometimes lie to psychologists). Babies are open books: Smiling, cooing, and giggling indicate positive feelings; frowning, fussing, and wailing indicate negative feelings. So you can look at babies and try to assess whether, in their waking moments, there are more expressions of positivity or negativity.

It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with babies on a regular basis, so I did a Twitter poll:

Throwing out the abstainers, you get about 70% positive and 30% negative—a strong majority of respondents feel that babies have more positive feelings than negative ones.

One might conclude that the “babies are happy” side of the argument wins. But that’s not where I think we should end up.

1. Instead of treating this as a question where some people are right and others are wrong, it might make more sense to assume that everyone is accurate about the particular babies they encounter. If so, the world contains about 70% mostly-positive babies and about 30% mostly-negative babies.

2. As one person on Twitter suggested, the 12-month age range may be too long—perhaps the younger babies tend to be sadder and the older ones tend to be happier (or vice versa). If so, then those who answered with mostly-positive might be reporting on babies of different ages than those who answered with mostly-negative.

3. Framing the question the way I did ignores intensity. Suppose a baby spends a bit more time having positive experiences than negative ones, but the negative experiences are much stronger (the baby shrieks in distress from gas pain, say) than the positive ones (the baby looks around with mild interest). This is a life that’s overall negative from a pain-pleasure perspective, but my way of asking the question would put it as a positive.

Here’s how a real study would work. It would be a third-person experience sampling study. Instead of judging one’s own feelings at random times, the rater assesses the babies’ feelings, and not just in a binary positive/negative way; rather the question would be something like: “How is the baby feeling, from a scale of 1 to 10?” The study would test lots of babies of different ages, ideally with more than one rater per baby, so you can explore how reliable the raters are.

Putting together such a study would be expensive and time-consuming, and I can’t think of a theoretical reason for doing this—I’m not sure what deep questions about developmental psychology it would address. Still, it would be very cool.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that many babies, maybe most, have lives that are net negative from a pleasure/pain perspective. And what other perspective could you apply to babies? It’s not like you can say that their suffering is offset because they believe that their lives are meaningful, that they feel they are making the world a better place, or that are comforted by knowing that good things are just around the corner—though all of this may be true for adults.

We haven’t evolved to be happy, after all. We’ve evolved to survive and reproduce, and pleasure and pain are biological adaptations that help us get there—roughly, pleasure is a signal that things are good, and pain is a signal that something has gone wrong. Babies are both vulnerable and helpless, and things go wrong all the time. They will be hungry, too cold, too warm, too gassy, terrified because they have been left alone in the dark. Babies lack any capacity to solve these problems by themselves, and so, unless they are surrounded by extremely attentive and fast-acting adults, they are in near-constant states of distress. They can also experience moments of real joy, sure, but the life of your average baby is a troubled one.

It gets better. With age comes control. Hunger is less horrible when you can walk to the fridge; it’s not such a big deal to be cold if you can put on a sweater. The emergence of language, the growth of the imagination, and the emerging capacity to plan and map out our futures—all of these give us access to new sorts of pleasure. In certain ways, life might get worse; our cognitive powers allow for more mature horrors, such as feelings of dread and humiliation. But on the whole, the outlook is good. Life starts off wretched and gets better.

1. Yes, my heterodox friends—a trigger warning! See here for my defense of these.