You can train dogs and cats to be quiet and sit still. Not all of them will be happy doing it for a long plane ride, but you can do it. Babies on the other hand? Babies don't give a fuck.

Hungry?

Scream.

Tired?

Scream.

Happy?

Scream.

Mad?

Scream

You can do everything right and the baby will still scream.

See, I have this speculation that early humans were fucking dumb, had no object permanence, couldn't keep track of their kids, and generally pretended they didn't exist unless they were being annoying. So their babies had to fucking scream as loud as a firetruck for their parents to not lose them.

That's the other thing too. The sound of a crying baby will drive anyone who doesn't have antisocial personality disorder or has been driven deaf by the wonders of childcare completely insane. Why? Because while the sheer volume of a baby's scream might not be as loud as a barking dog on an objective decibel scale, but when it comes to perceptual decibel levels, babies are loud. Our hearing sensitivity varies based on pitch. The higher the pitch, the more sensitive our ears are. On top of that, our brains are hardwired to have a reaction to a screaming baby, which can manifest itself as irritation, annoyance, frustration, and other negative emotions, because our primitive monkey brains are screeching, "WHY WON'T YOU TAKE CARE OF BABY!?" but we can't do anything because it's not our baby.

That's why people like to make jokes about dead babies, infant abuse, etc. Because babies are annoying as hell and literally everything they do is designed to make sure we know they're there at all times.

Edit: AND ONE MORE THING, have you ever wondered how a parent can love their baby when it's quiet but hate it when it's awake? Yeah, that's almost certainly a result of primitive humans trying to take advantage of the fact that the annoying poop demon was finally quiet and wasn't ear-fucking their monkey brain into guilt-tripping them anymore, so that they could ditch their babies when they were sleeping. So you can probably thank the negligent, sociopathic protohumans for babies being annoying as shit.

[–] GreenMario@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love this theory that early (and current) humans were so incompetently stupid that we evolved to fucking scream all the time just so they don't walk away and forget us.

Considering how many kids get left in locked cars in the summer, as well as no other species of animal has annoying ass babies I have to canonize this as the Truth.

[–] MossyFeathers@pawb.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Consider this as well: if you're a primitive human and you have to take your baby somewhere, you're going to be praying to whatever deity(s) you believe are watching over you that your baby understands the severity of the situation and doesn't start screaming in the middle of the jungle. 'cause if it does, every predator in a 5 mile radius is going to hear your baby screaming and dinner bells will start going off in their heads. Our only major survival traits are our near-infinite stamina (if properly trained) and ability to magically fuse or deform useless objects into something useful. Additionally, the usefulness of both of those traits diminishes with the size of the group as a single human with a spear is far less likely to survive a tiger attack than two humans with spears. To put it another way, your baby will actively alert predators that you're burdened with its existence and that you could be free food so that you get removed from the gene pool if you're stupid or unlucky enough to travel alone.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Babies evolved to cry all the time because their parents had this habit of making the species that just looked at the baby in a weird way go extinct.