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"Babies have no way of knowing that the mother who went out of town on business is not dead, that sabertooth tigers are extinct, jaguars scarce, abandonment illegal, or how few modern mothers would, in fact, contemplate it," writes Sarah Blaffer Hrdy '68, Ph.D. '75, in Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (Pantheon, $35). "For babies are designed to proceed as if no baby bottle had been invented, no laws had ever been passed." The baby's strategy to get the care it needs is to be adorable, and every trait--plumpness, cuteness--that increases adorability has been selected for. Writes Hrdy, a former professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, "Over tens of thousands of years, any infant whose lusciousness was detectably less proved ever so slightly less likely to survive."
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When they were young, I called all my children "sweet potato," "muffin," "cutie-pie." I'd say, "You're so adorable I could eat you up." I actually spoke to them this way. So have many other parents. What on earth could be the point of all this talk of eating? In retrospect, after a bit of Darwinian self-analysis, I suppose I really did have flesh on my mind. Soft as rose petals, such delectable new tissue, so healthy, not to mention parasite-free. But, however delectable, I am positive that I never had any inclination whatsoever to eat my children (although I acknowledge desiring more control over them, body and soul, than their own strong wills were ever inclined to grant). Furthermore, like the fry of mouth-brooding fish who dart confidently right in and out of mother's maw--and do note that, unlike humans, most fish, size permitting, are highly cannibalistic--my own small fry never seemed the least concerned about my culinary endearments. They giggled.
For, as designed by Mother Nature, the delectability of infants seduces to quite different ends. My children's deliciousness rendered me more willing to be consumed by them, to give up bodily resources, and in my own contemporary example, most importantly, time--time, time, time, right down to the last syllable of allocatable time...--and so to subordinate my own aspirations to their desires so we could all (more or less) contentedly take our places at posterity's table.
...What infants yearn for is the reassurance that they will never lose their caretaker's love, that no matter what, she (or he) will keep them safe from any lurking hazard. Although female caretakers are more fluent in high-pitched babyese, and have the advantage of being able to nurse, and a head start toward becoming the infant's primary object of desire, fathers should not sell short their own ability to reassure--or harm. Far better than most, Aaron the Moor, the Shakespearean dad desperate to keep his lover from killing their child, understood the message infants want to hear from anyone who matters when he announced that "this [babe], before all the world will I keep safe."