I think the part of being a Boy Scout where you are an older teen and expected to look after the younger children in the troop had some of this effect on me. I am bummed that Boy Scouts has collapsed for poor leadership reasons.
I definitely experienced some version of this at the birth of my child. I was convinced, even while I knew it was likely not true in the outside view, that my baby was actually the cutest baby. My child is not genetically related to me, so I don't think this was a matter of calibrating my standards for cuteness on other babies in my family or on similarity to myself. Also, I definitely have a persistent increased tendency to cry during movies, especially in scenes that involve the separation of parents and children.
I do have a sibling 4 years younger, and have always generally liked babies and children, but this was an additional effect.
I agree I've felt something similar when having kids. I'd also read the relevant Paul Graham bit, and it wasn't really quite as sudden or dramatic for me. But it has had a noticeable effect long term. I'd previously been okay with kids, though I didn't especially seek out their company or anything. Now it's more fun playing with them, even apart from my own children. No idea how it compares to others, including my parents.
This happened to me, but later. When my first child was born, I didn't think she was particularly cute, but I took care of her and was kind to her because of my parental duty. Then when she was three months old, she smiled at me the first time, and I got chills down my back, and knew I loved her, and she loved me, and she was the most important thing in the world. I've since described the sensation as "my cerebrospinal fluid filled with love."
So it doesn't have to happen at birth.
I did not experience any changes like this at all when my daughter was born. When a child myself, I loved younger children, but as an adult I've not been very keen on young children, and I'm not particularly attached to my daughter either.
This is actually one of the many reasons I don't ever want to have children in the future. I am very wary of the idea of being forced to care more about a specific person or group of people than about everyone else, as it seems very unfair to me - and also I think that our society massively over-fixates on a rather ill-defined goal of protecting children, which often ends up smothering them (helicopter parenting etc), and I don't want to be tempted to do that.
I certainly care about them in abstract as you describe having done before - but if I got too emotional about it, I feel like I'd make bad decisions that were more rooted in "feeling like a good parent or parent-like-person" than in what is actually best for everyone.
Are you saying that you think that you in particular would be unusually prone to over-fixating on a child of your own, smothering them, and making other bad decisions? If instead you think that this just a common failure mode, not one that you are especially prone to, why would you think that future children would be worse off with you as a parent than someone else?
As for thinking it unfair for you to care more about a specific person than about everyone else, have you thought through how your notion of fairness would play out for actual children? Do you think there is no value to a child in their knowing that there are some people who have a special interest in their welfare (ie, who love them)?
I retained the ability to believe and act upon the belief that children need to be allowed the freedom to make sub-critical mistakes. I think if you were to go into it averse to smothering children, believing-in taking children seriously, etc., that those beliefs will survive the process.
I wonder if the effect is stronger for people who don't have younger siblings. Maybe for people with younder siblings, part of the effect kicks in when they have a younger sibling (but they're generally too young to notice this), so the effect of becoming a parent is smaller.
I remember when my younger brother was born, and this sensation of going from this scaredy hypochondriac 6 year old (who worried about poisonous spiders, house fires, earthquakes, etc), to a mindset of "Okay, but what will I DO if there is a fire. How will I get me and little brother out the window?". There was this really sharp sensation of "Oh, I'm responsible now." and an associated values system shift, which... I suspect is similar to what a lot of people are talking about here?
Pretty much all of my adult life, my baseline levels of "protection towards children" are pretty damn high... to the point where I stand up and move to a more protective position when I see children near ledges, (even random strangers kids).
Of course... I don't yet have children of my own, so is hard to compare to what other people are describing with respect to having kids, but based on my own personal experience so far... yeah, I'd say younger siblings definitely CAN have a similar trigger effect.
Personally, while I like my younger siblings a lot (1.5y and 4y younger) I don't think I had much of this sort of effect. I didn't feel fiercely protective of them, media involving harm to children didn't bother me until I had my own kids, etc.
The transition to parenthood wasn't very pronouncd fir me - probably because I loved being around children before. Maybe you are onto something: I am the oldest sibling and I remember really liking to care of my twin siblings when the were babies and I was thirteen. I think it bit only prepared me but might also have kicked in the drive. I also remember studies showing that teens who have to take care of crying baby dolls as a means to discourag teen pregnancies didn't work too well because the girls developed affections for the baby dolls anyway. Maybe an experiment people could do is to find a family with kids and help out when their baby is small and see how it is. Also: Maybe people in rationalist group houses mit Kids could be polled?
Not sure if this is useful or not but an anecdote from a nonkidhaver:
I was playing The Binding of Isaac with my nephew, who was born more recently than it was published, and his guy died, but I was still going. I was just thinking about the game and I didn't notice right away, but at some point I realized that he was excitedly looking at the screen, hoping that I would win it for us, and experienced a step increase in how much I cared about the game. I gained the power to dodge bullets, and eventually, to see the future, and I did ultimately win. It was the best I've ever played the game, and a lifetime top 10 video game moment experientially.
My tentative model of this parent experience you're talking about is something like, if that story just kept going, instead of being about a particular instance of babysitting which has since ended. Curious if this resonates with anything that the kidhavers remember from The Before Time.
I know this isn't what you're getting at, but reading your story made me think about how it is often the other way around with parents as they grow old and their children grow up. Watching your children, and everyone's children, carry forward what you no longer can, and feeling pride in their accomplishments. And the children, now adults, playing harder and better by knowing they're playing for everyone who came before them.
OK, I'm glad you replied with this, because I think maybe I was zooming in on the wrong thing. I was kind of thinking of "protecc smol" as being the Parent Thing but maybe a better babysitting anecdote would be something like this:
When I was a teenager, perhaps about two years older than my nephew is now, I was playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES, with the secret code I will remember until the day I die (down R up L Y B) unlocking even higher speeds than the already unusually high speed of the game. I generally played it on max difficulty, max speed, and I was trying to beat it with every character under those conditions. At some point, my mother, who was younger then than I am now, walked up behind me and watched the game for a while, and then declared that what was going on on the screen was "incomprehensible," and left.
When my nephew plays Isaac on his Switch, he's unaware of a lot of the regularities of the game that allow me to predict things before they happen, but he partially compensates for that by having what seem to my now-older eyes to be superhuman reflexes. I've been mostly successful at avoiding giving him advice... part of the game is figuring stuff out for yourself. But occasionally I'll ask a fake question like, "I wonder if the super secret room is north of you right now," and kinda nudge him a little. At some point, I realized that his ability to YOLO items he's never seen before [1] and just transform his play style in an instant, react to enemy behavior successfully even though he doesn't have the experience to anticipate it, etc., is probably not so different, as perceived by me, to how my mother perceived my own youthful high CPU MHz all those years ago, and thus the wheel of time continues to turn.
Is that more similar to what you're talking about?
1: for anyone who doesn't play, the version he's currently playing on console doesn't document what items do, at all, and a significant number of them significantly change what the optimal tactics are, and you just have to deduce and memorize that stuff, or repeatedly check a wiki, for 700-some vaguely mnemonic little pixel art icons. (This feature was recently added to the Steam version, though.)
I think merely taking estradiol for gender transition triggered the caring-terminally-about-children effect for me. Possibly related: my blood estradiol levels got too high for a while, and I essentially had a pregnant woman’s hormone mix, for a while.
I’d previously liked kids somewhat, enjoyed teaching, enjoyed playing with them. Now they’re aggressively cute, makes me actively happy to notice children being happy or learning with or without my involvement, etc.
When I get close to a romantic partner, I will find them more physically alluring, and cuter. In many ways it seems like much of my attraction is locked behind personal connection ('demisexual', which I previously made fun of until I learned of people not like that and looked at stats on willingness to have casual sex with a stranger).
I'd want to know how the children-caring switch differs (aside from it not being romantic or sexual of course!). It sounds like the main difference is that it's much faster?
Before I became a parent I cared about children in general, intellectually, in the same way that I care about people in general: a general sense that I want good things to happen to them. Over the first few days of Lily's life, however, I noticed I cared for her deeply and emotionally, where her wellbeing was incredibly important to me, and she was far more cuddly and interesting than I expected. Over the next few months, I realized that my disposition toward children in general had also changed, and while I didn't feel as strongly as toward my own, they were now similarly far more fun, interesting, and precious than they had been. I also started having strong emotional reactions to reading about harm to children. Paul Graham writes about a similar experience, though I think one a bit more sudden than my own:
And Maia commenting on a post of Julia's:
In deciding to have kids this is a very difficult factor to consider, because it doesn't happen to everyone. I have a vague impression that it is a bit more common in men than women, perhaps because women understandably have a higher threshold for deciding to have kids, but there are definitely men who expect it to happen and are dismayed when it doesn't and women who are surprised at how much their feelings toward children change.
Getting better at predicting this transformation seems valuable: since becoming a parent is a lifelong decision, the value of information is really high. Do people tend to have similar experiences to their own parents? Is it correlated with any other aspects of personality? Can your friends or other people who know you well predict this? Can it be triggered, if it's going to, by something less permanent than becoming a parent or is the permanence a key component? Is it something that may or may not happen, and when it happens it is a similar magnitude for everyone, or is it something where most people change a bit on becoming a parent, anywhere along a range from "imperceptibly" to "enormously"? Do we know how prevalent these changes are?