Don't say nothin' bad about my baby

So, on yesterday's chat, a childless chatter mentioned being grossed out when the mothers of her acquaintance go into gory (and sometimes gore is the least of it) detail about pregnancies, toilet-training, and the like. I was entertained by this because I've addressed the psychology of it directly in my book. The promised excerpt:

Disgust is one of six “basic” emotions, which means emotions that are shared across all cultures (the others are fear, happiness, surprise, sadness, and anger). The purpose of disgust, it seems, is to keep us away from things that can make us sick. The more something looks like a disease threat, the more disgusting it is—towels stained with blue or green dye aren’t judged as disgusting, but towels stained with dye that looks like pus or excrement are. Cultures vary to some extent in what they consider disgusting, especially around food, but the gross-out factor is universal for things like rotten meat and decomposing vegetable matter, blood, excrement, and dead bodies.

We’re not born with the capacity to feel disgust, a truth that most parents can illustrate with a repertoire of hilarious yet disturbing stories. We have to learn what to be grossed out by. This is why, often, little kids will get it “wrong”—not only will they fail to be disgusted by something that should disgust them, but they will do things like hold a crumpled, but clean, paper tissue at arm’s length and make a thoroughly skeeved expression. They haven’t yet figured out that crumpled Kleenex are only disgusting if they’re used.

Disgust works beautifully to keep us away from pathogens. As useful as that is evolutionarily, though, it would be a bad thing if we couldn’t overcome it, because we would freak out and abandon our babies in the forest the first time they made doody. So love can conquer disgust. One delightful experiment had mothers smell-testing their babies’, and other babies’, dirty diapers in a blind test. The title sums up the results: “My Baby Doesn’t Smell as Bad as Yours: The Plasticity of Disgust.” As the authors put it, “we reasoned that a mother’s care for her infant is inextricably linked to frequently encountered disgust elicitors (e.g., vomit, urine, and feces) and that disgust to such elicitors represents an obstacle to care.”

This is actually from the chapter on pets, not children. Pets, as I've noted before, sort of freeride on our natural caretaking instincts, so we relate to them very much the way we relate to children. When you love your pet, the things they do aren't disgusting to you anymore. And it's really hard to keep in mind that other people who don't have pets--or children--still have the same perspective that you did back in your petless/childless days.