Infant Motivation Essay

Infants are in no way passive recipients of care and support, both while in utero and during infancy into adolescence. As humans evolved towards modernity, fetuses and infants have adapted concurrently, actively attempting to increase their own fitness and guarantee their safety. While these adaptations may not be conscious, infants have a biological agency that allows them to maximize the attention given to them, leading to a higher chance of surviving past the helplessness of infancy and into adulthood. This can be seen in utero through the fetuses interactions with the placenta, as well as extrauterine, through cuteness and all the benefits that may arise from being cute.
While developing in the mother’s womb, fetuses actively attempt

Traits such as rounder faces, larger eyes, more body fat, clumsy movements, and “cute” noises make infants more attractive to parents and alloparents alike, increasing their social support network and chances of survival. These traits may also signal other aspects of an infant’s health; the neonates that exhibit these traits are seen as healthy and are more likely to be taken care of by parents or alloparents. Infants who are cute are liked the best, receive a higher motivation of care, experience more affectionate interactions with their mothers, receive fewer punishments, and possibly receive different treatments from those outside of the family (Golle et al 2015, 2). Since these infants who devoted developmental energy to cuteness would be met with sufficient feeding and protection, they would have the ability to devote more energy after birth to the systems that may have received less energy while in development. They may also have higher chances of allonursing, supplementary to the mother’s nutrition, or as a substitute. This would be beneficial to the infant; allonursing would diversity the microbiome and supply the infant with more beneficial bacteria, the infant would have increased socialization, further growing its social network, and also be exposed to a larger number of pathogens, diversifying and