Emotional overload

I hate it when people say shit like this so authoritatively. Like this is some conjecture at best. It’s a baby. No one knows why a baby does this. Someone assumed that and some other people said oh yeah that makes sense.
- We interviewed 10,000 babies and learned jack shit
  
  Or like a study in UK concluded: fuck all.
  
  We interviewed 10,000 babies and the most common answer were:
  giggle
  cry
  smile
  shit themselves
- My first thought what how the fuck could you possibly know that
- It doesn't really seem that hard to test? Emotions--at least in their occurrence and strength--are detectable with non-invasive brain scans. We've been doing that for ages. Put some electrodes on a baby, let them see their mommy, watch the graph spike until they turn away.
  The argument "how could we know that about babies?" was used, for decades, to justify doing surgery on babies without anesthesia. They can't talk, so who knows if they're feeling pain or not. Guess we can safely assume they don't. Point being, we don't have to have a conversation with them about it to know why they're doing something.
  
  Oh yeah let me just plug in an fmri and find out if someone is definitively experiencing “joy”. That’s high level somewhat subjective emotion, not pain. Neurological understanding is not nearly as advanced as you think it is. I spent my post doc doing fmri research; the best thing you could come up with here is “areas of the brain associate with pleasure are highly activated” but even that doesn’t necessarily indicate the baby feels overwhelmed. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s some fancier neuroscientist out their that can read baby brains but I doubt it
  
  Yeah baby please stand still for the brainscan... Or try to laugh while your head is restrained in a vise. Easy peasy
- It's nicer to believe than my baby turned away because it's tummy hurts from laughing at my face too much.
  
  it's tummy
  ~~its tummy :)~~
  Edit: I stand corrected. Their tummy.
- I emote like you on this one

That sounds incredibly pulled out of someone's ass.
- Source: trust me bro
  Also "emoting"
  
  Hey, I have no problem with verbing words though. Also emote has been in use for many decades.
  
  I initially assumed they meant emojiing the chocolate ice cream emoji in their nappies

Babies are the most adorable things that routinely ruin your sleep isolate you from your friends eat your entire wallet and reward you by making you personally clean all their literal shit.
And some how when they grow up all you can do is wish you had your adorable scrunchietato back
- Missing commas aside, I agree.
  
  , , , , ,
  I had some extra ones laying around for you.
  
  I think the lack of commas is a stylistic choice, the unceasing torrent of negative words relating to the frantic nature of parenthood, dealing with one thing after another without pause.
  If it's not, then that seems like quite a happy little accident!
- And some how when they grow up all you can do is wish you had your adorable scrunchietato back
  Speak for yourself, fam. Parenting has only gotten better as they age for me. Every year has been better than the last. Granted, they are 8 and 11 so things might change at some point soon. Lol
  I miss very little about them being babies. It was a miserable time, a study even showed that the year after the birth of a first child is worse for happiness than the death of your spouse.
  
  It’s starts to hit different once they begin formulating their own independent life. It’s just a big adjustment and takes a mental change to finding comfort while they’re absent.

Actually it's because they didn't buy the premium emote as it was like a thousand V-Bucks.

Isn’t this woman some sort of religious fundamentalist?
- She is religious, and writes opinion articles, so I wouldn't take anything she says any more seriously than anything you read here.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bruenig
  https://www.theatlantic.com/author/elizabeth-bruenig/
  This makes me think she's probably not a fundie.
  https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-atlantic/

I have a feeling this is like that elephant "fact" that was spread around and I 100% fell for, that elephants look at us and think we're "cute".

Plausible enough, but a good reminder to read the citation before passing along as a fact. That’s how dictatorships come about.

Fake or not it made me smile and I do think/remember children feelings being extremely strong. Minor shit makes kids cry and wallow in despair. We all ought to remember about that more often and be gentle with little humans
- It's all the best and worst they've ever felt, cause it's all they've known yet.

Reminds me of autism
- Autism is our natural state but for most people vaccines push it out of the body
  (it was in the balls)
  
  So my orchiectomy will remove my autism? 😭
  
  I thought all balls were filled with microplastic these days.
  
  Well now I'm picturing the poor SoB who got his mmr directly into the testicle
  I don't know who'd be in bigger legal trouble, the parent who let it happen or the doctor who's batshot enough to actually do it

In my experience, the first time your child smiles at you, you're overwhelmed with joy and wonder, which is undercut moments late by the realization that your child is not smiling because of you, but because they just took a massive shit.

My adult partner also does this

... they sometimes turn away in the middle of smiling at you because they're so overwhelmed by joy they can't handle all the emotion and have to regulate like Warren G and Nate Dogg.

Regardless of the source's background, the information she mentioned actually reflects current knowledge of how infants and older children develop. In order to develop emotion regulation skills, healthy attachment, and social skills, we do naturally look away from our caregiver and others doting on us as a way to self-regulate intense feelings.
In fact, many children can develop attachment and emotion regulation issues if caregivers aren't responsive and share compassion or empathize with a child's behavior (e.g. a baby becoming upset and crying if- when looking away- the caregiver instead tries to get its attention repeatedly and not giving the child a break.) That's why it's important to have some level of emotional intelligence to develop healthy attachments with kids and them with us.
For more information, you can look up attachment theory and theories on human development (Erikson, Piaget, etc.). This is also mentioned here.
Source: Therapist

[citation needed]

It’s projecting. And delusion.
First words are also often ‘mam’ ‘mum’ and a bit later ‘da’ or ‘pa’, not because babies love their parents, but because those are the easiest sounds to mimic.
So we adopted those sounds/words to mean mother and father. Not the other way around. We are really good at finding arguments to fit our view and narrative.