Babies aren’t perfect; they’re human

For a while there, it seemed like you couldn’t get away from headlines wailing about “baby geniuses,” the “Tao of babies, or that special “baby wisdom.”

Nonsense.

It always seemed to me that the people who go on and on about how great babies are have never had to get through the night with one. Sure, you adore them, but “enlightened being” is not the term that bubbles up to consciousness at 4 a.m., when you are making your seventh sprint of the night to the crib.

Though it’s true that happy, smiling babies are 99 percent worthy of the endless-joy hype, it turns out that, alas, babies are people, too.

A new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences posits that when babies sense that resources are scarce, they’re just as tribal and merciless as adults.

Researchers from Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tested prior research showing that infants understand loyalty and fairness. In the test, researchers showed infants a scene in which a monkey puppet presented a tray of identical cookies to two other puppets: one that looked like a monkey and another that looked like a giraffe. When there were more cookies than puppets, the infants expected all of the puppets — regardless of species — to receive equal cookies.

But when there was the same number of cookies and puppets, the infants expected the distributing puppet to give all the cookies to its own social group — and they noticed when the distributor gave any of the cookies to the outgroup puppet. This indicated to researchers that the infants’ group loyalty overrode their innate sense of fairness.

Perhaps that special baby wisdom we’ve heard so much about is actually just plain-old sectarian self-interest. Though not a pleasant aphorism that could be stitched on a pink or blue pillow, these innate preferences for “our own kind” might be indicative of the sort of primal survival instincts that have allowed our species to thrive, even as some members of the species claim supremacy over others.

A separate study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association busted the myth that people overeat and get fat primarily because marketing, and other environmental factors such as a glut of cheap calories, have overwritten their natural instincts for self-regulation. Wrong again. In a clinical trial carried out in New Zealand, women were trained to interpret their baby’s signals and encourage them to take charge of their own food consumption — yet lots of babies still overate. Ten percent of the infants in the intervention group, who were encouraged to self-feed instead of strictly relying on spoon-feeding, were overweight by age 2.

In fact, the study found no statistically significant differences in Body Mass Index between the self-feeding babies and those who were weaned from the breast and introduced to solid foods with spoon feeding. Like adults, babies will overeat if they have unfettered access to lots of food.

It turns out that little humans are still just as basically imperfect as adults in many ways.

That’s OK. If contemporary parenting books — like “The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed” by Jessica Lahey or “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success” by Julie Lythcott-Haims — have anything to teach us, it is that over-exalting babies and children is not the best path to raising a well-adjusted adult.

Or, if you prefer the underlying truths of dark humor, consider this nugget from a satirical piece in The Onion titled “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths”: “Most adults are completely unaware that they could be living among callous monsters who would remorselessly exploit them to obtain something as insignificant as an ice cream cone or a new toy.”

Just kidding! Seriously: Don’t despair, new parents.

Babies undoubtedly bring wisdom, enlightenment and joy into our lives.

They are master teachers and their harshest, but most important lesson, is one everybody should learn as early in life as possible: It’s not all about you.

Selflessness is a beautiful quality to learn from caring for babies — and one that should be cultivated and developed in them throughout their fleetingly short childhood and young adulthood as well.