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DavidAgain comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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I am 19, and apparently I had a cached belief that 16 is the ideal age for childbirth. (I've tried to track down the source, and I think it's from a novel I read a really, really long time ago, where a character was 'legally too young, but biologically the ideal age for childbirth'.) A quick Google search suggested 25-35 years of age as the period of peak fertility. Which I did not know. And which makes me feel better about having to delay having kids until then.
No doubt. But in general, I think a LOT of people (especially females) will have had the personal experiences that lead them to think babies are cute. And I wouldn't be surprised if mothers whose 'cuteness' instinctive response is lower would have more trouble raising children, no matter how good their intentions. (I have a very sad story about this, actually, but I'm saving it for a top-level post.)
This reminds me of the area of qualitative research (in nursing, but you can do it anywhere I assume.) You go out and interview a whole bunch of people (mothers with babies in this case) and ask them a lot of questions about the emotions they feel surrounding their child and how their warm fuzzy feelings affect the way they care for your child. Then you compile the results, pick out common trends, and you have some empirical evidence to justify your just-so stories. (Assuming that baby-cuteness serves the same purpose now as it did during our evolution, which I think is safe.)
As an aside, I really don't have much of a cuteness response to animals. I occasionally feel guilty eating meat because of a top-down moral belief that they have some form of consciousness and ability to feel pain, but on a purely emotional level I doubt I would have any trouble killing and eating a rabbit.
The 'younger the better' belief is quite common. I assume that it's because most people worrying about age and childrens are at the older end and thinking they should be younger, and so they project that backwards. Also it fits with some popular myths of 'everyone used to have kids at 14'.
On the generalising from one example, I was actually addressing Alicorn's original point. That babies are cute is pretty generally accepted, but I wouldn't be able to guess how many people prefer bunnies.
Surveys sound interesting, but there are also areas where people misreport, either because they think there's a 'right response' or because they simply mistake their own views.
I'm squeamish about killing animals, and mammals more than lizards etc., but I don't think cute baby mammals would be harder to kill.
I have been attempting a Google search to find out the average age of first-time mothers in the year 1500. I'm guessing it would tend to be younger in rural regions, but my search so far as turned up nothing but noise.
This is one of the skepticisms I had when we first learned about qualitative research in my nursing class. But I guess the point is less to be objective and more just to gather descriptive data. Later on you can choose your variables and find reliable ways to measure them, and your research becomes quantitative.
You can find some relevant data about pre-Industrial and Industrial England in chapter 12 of Clark's Farewell to Alms. (Interestingly, age of marriage - which implies first pregnancy since illegitimacy was so rare - dropped around 2-3 years for women between the 1600s and 1800s.)
Same demographer friend (more accurately, ex-girlfriend who was studying social and economic history at the time) told me that illegitimacy varied a lot by region in the early modern period. If I recall correctly, there were Northern rural communities where the first child was typically born before marriage. Or maybe so soon after that the parents must have known the women would bear a child. This was because marriage was seen as marking when you set up house, rather than the start of sex, and because you wouldn't fix a relationship until fertility/combatibility was clear. People may have become engaged and pledged to each other first, mind.