Comments on: Esten

By: Xanthippas

Xanthippas — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:49:12 +0000

Are you kidding? As I’ve gotten older (and since I’ve had my own) I’ve found it impossible to read about kids in terrible circumstances without getting choked up. I’ll probably be one of those weepy old people. Sigh…

By: Anderson

Anderson — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:59:27 +0000

What Rea said. I’m the dad of a 2-year-old, and I had to put down Niall Ferguson’s War of the World a couple of times due to horrible things done to children in the Armenian & Jewish genocides.

But even before that, I’ve gotten more mawkish with age, in general & not just about kids. For years now, I tear up when Leia tells Han “I love you” and he replies, “I know.” Which sounds like a confession of aesthetic illiteracy, I guess.

By: jen

jen — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 01:12:37 +0000

I used to laugh at my mom & tell her she was being ridiculous for crying any time a missing kid report was on the news. I now, a year into motherhood myself, COMPLETELY GET IT. My husband watches “To Catch a Predator” with this sick fascination and I have to yell at him to change it because I get this awful anxiety bordering on nausea and he doesn’t understand why. Fatherhood hasn’t changed his sense of “but that could be OUR KID” at all, he’s still oblivious.

By: vivian

vivian — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 04:38:46 +0000

Seems like someone should mention the CNET editor fellow about now… Can’t stop thinking about it.

By: magistra

magistra — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 14:31:41 +0000

I wonder if it’s a recent historical phenomenon that people feel a sudden change in their emotions towards children’s suffering. After all, in the West, we’re now in one of the few historical periods in which many people can live a substantial part of their life without close contact with any children, let alone suffering children. In most other cultures, almost everyone would see children that they knew well dying young. Maybe it’s more strange (or at least historically unusual) to live in a world where you can regard Little Nell’s death as funny, because it’s unimaginable in real-life?

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 12:14:42 +0000

it happened to me while I was pregnant for the first time. I suddenly couldn’t watch wildlife shows where the mother giraffe has to abandon an unhealthy newborn, or hyenas get the baby widlebeest. I am now ripe for the most formulaic child in danger movie scenarios when I used to find them too transparently manipulative to be effective. also, I can barely read anything about the holocaust now. or in the gulag archipelago where the women prisoners are saving up sugar somehow to make a little christening cake! I better stop now or I’ll cry.

By: Nick Barnes

Nick Barnes — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 08:58:12 +0000

Oh, yes. It happened to me quite suddenly when my children were born, but based on some previous comments one wonders whether it’s a general effect among adults of a certain age, and is dramatically accelerated by parenthood.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 02:28:11 +0000

I’m looking – it will probably have to wait until tomorrow…

By: vivian

vivian — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 01:50:19 +0000

I think having a child caused the most dramatic increase in my empathy for other kids, especially suffering ones. But it wasn’t the first or only increase – it’s kind of horrifying to think just how casual and intellectual I once was.
Sentimentality is related, but I think different, it’s influenced by lots of things, such as deliberate, studied attempts to make us all care about Nemo. At my most cynical I would tear up at movies sometimes, never at compelling ones, only embarrassingly formulaic ones.

By: double-plus-ungood

double-plus-ungood — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:31:00 +0000

I think there’s some biological change that curses parents of both gender. I’ve been suffering from the guy version of the malady for twenty years now.

Before children, I would look at a story of parents who threw themselves into a well to save a child and consequently drowned and wonder “what the hell were they thinking? Theyhad no chance of getting the kid or themselves out.” Now I think “those poor saps, they had no choice.”

By: Another Duncan

Another Duncan — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 22:24:15 +0000

I don’t have kids and I’m a guy and I find it harder to deal with suffering in children. When I first read “The Wasp Factory” at 18 I thought it was an amusing book with a clever twist. Now at 35 I think it is appalling.

By: ingrid

ingrid — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 21:29:50 +0000

brian, I would love to learn more about that study if you have time to dig it up (but of course you are welcome to say whatever you’d like to contribute without linking etc.) One problem with this kind of studies might be that one possible partial explanation for the differnece between parents and non-parents may be that people who are more sensitive are more likely to become parents (I wouldn’t support this hypothesis based on personal observations).

What would be really interesting, but I have never heard of anyone doing it, is to survey people (parents, non-parents, men, women etc.) on a regular basis, and from these longitudional data try to figure out whether parenthood really makes a difference in how sensitive one is to seeing the pain of others, or whether parenthood is correlated to something else that really triggers the tears.

I don’t know of any of such studies, but the comments in this section seems to suggest that both parental status and age matter (gender perhaps too, but since we don’t tend to change our gender over time, we don’t know from personal experience). Age might in fact be correlated to something else too – like going through the experience of losing important others. If that were true, then age itself would not be the factor, but certain important experiences in life.

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:59:43 +0000

Another dad with a “me too!”
Interestingly, the completely irrational but nonetheless intense bursts of fear I started getting when my son was born disappeared completely after my daughter was born. A friend reported the same thing. The head space just isn’t available any more.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:46:46 +0000

Well, I know of at least one study where the response to a crying infant were compared between men and women with and without children, and they were different – both between gender and child status. I can’t remember now how much physiology was done, and I can’t find it online. (I’m not where I have good library access right now)

If memory serves, though, there is some good biological data on this kind of thing. If anyone thinks I should find these and link to them or not bother commenting, I will make an effort to dig them up.

And Alex – I symphatise! I’ve had to watch Finding Nemo about 50 times in the last year, and it gets me every time.

By: Daniel Nexon

Daniel Nexon — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 19:39:06 +0000

I’ve had the same reaction. In my case, the clearest difference comes when I teach my intermittent course on the politics of genocide. I used to maintain some distance from descriptions of mass slaughter and brutalization, but now I find teaching and reading relevant material far more emotionally wrenching.