My nephew had severe colic. He screamed for months. One time I took a walk with him, my sister, and my dad, and he just screamed the entire time. I was generally able to tune it out, but my mom and sister really struggled.
I don’t think my nephew was in the most challenging 5% of babies. A little under 2% are severely premature, so their parents likely fear for their lives. And I’m guessing another 3% have different severe challenges.
But my nephew was in the hardest 20% of babies. My baby, so far, is in the easiest.
Expecting Worse
When I was getting ready to be a parent, I often told myself: she could have colic. She could be a colicy baby. There’s some precedent in the family, and it’s not that rare. I told myself this because I wanted to steel myself for the possibility; in the event that my baby screamed all the time, I wanted to be ready. Plus, anticipating a difficult time felt somehow more honest than living on a cloud, dreaming up all the fun things baby and I would do together.
(As I type this, baby runs up and says “dada” to me, and then “beep” to her toy car; if I had been living on that cloud, I’d have been a prophet!)
In practice, these two reasons fed into each other. Wanting to be ready for the worst made it feel more responsible to think a lot about pretty bad outcomes, and thinking about pretty bad outcomes made them feel more normal.
On an individual level, I can report that my strategy worked great. One of the most reliable ways to be happy is to have reality exceed your expectations; when you expect a 20th percentile good outcome, you’re happy 80 percent of the time.
But also, I feel like most people expect to have difficult babies. And at a societal level, that seems bad.
Expecting Worse At Scale
It’s responsible to be ready for a hard baby. But also, it’s kind of a dick move to talk about having an easy baby.1 So prospective parents are in a weird information landscape. There are reasons for them to seek out gloomy stories, so as to gird their loins. Meanwhile, parents of difficult babies reasonably warn everybody, and parents of easy babies keep quiet. So there is both lots of supply and lots of demand for doom and gloom, and I think the typical young adult thinks of a worse-than-average parenting experience as the norm. To make matters worse, many of the most fun early parenting moments happen at home, privately, when nobody is watching. Big social events are often hard for babies, as are overwhelming public outings, so non-parents more often see meltdowns than smiling babies just fresh from their nap.
Alas, while sensibly girded loins are helpful, overly girded loins don’t tend to lead to babies. Probably the ideal decision procedure is to think of the median case when deciding if you want a kid, the bottom welfare quintile when confirming you can handle it, and the top welfare quintile, as a treat, when pregnancy is rough.
Or perhaps it’s best not to ruminate at all! Hmm. Imagine that.
Sorry!