No One Wants a TV Baby
But I kinda want a TikTok baby....
There are lots of studies about TV reducing fertility, I’ll link to one of them, and lots of theories about how the relationship between TV and decreased fertility works. My personal theory is that TV reduces fertility because babies cannot act.
They look into the camera unsettlingly, they always look at their fake actress mother like who the fuck is she (reasonably enough), they seem stressed out and disconnected to me. They’re still cute, because they’re babies, but the vibes are consistently unsettling. The more heavily your predictions about parenthood are influenced by TV (and I guess movies, too? any scripted images of parenthood), the less you are imagining a parent-child dyad that actually loves each other.
I’ve spent enough time with kids that I’ve always known what a baby in love looks like, and that babies on television don’t look like that. But if you haven’t spent time with kids in real life, it makes sense to imagine your potential baby as bored, boring, and disengaged, like a TV baby.
Social media is not like this. I, personally, watch too many baby/toddler TikToks.1 Nobody treats clips of babies from scripted video like this. This content is both more fun to watch, and more accurate, because it shows dyads who love each other.
I used to think that posting any content of children was wrong (I’d read a few personal essays by the children of parenting influencers & I was (am) a pretty black-and-white thinker). Even then, I would guiltily binge baby content from time to time.
When each of my children were babies, they had the most wonderful expressions at home, but when I took them out they often looked at other people quite blankly much of the time, like they were retreating into themselves a bit until the strangers went away. People they got to know would see their true selves more, but still, they saved their sweetest looks for at home.
All of the logistical problems with having babies or small children appear in TV or film are even more pronounced when it comes to theater. Not that there aren't sensible, practical reasons for this, but it means we're in a place where it's easier to stage a story about a family grieving the tragic death of a young child (e.g. "Rabbit Hole" by David Lindsay-Abaire) than a story about the experience of parenting a young child.