In our previous examination of the scope of poop, we ended our discussion with an observation that babies are poop machines. This is not meant as an insult to babies. Nevertheless, anyone who has ever had children or even observed children can see that babies do not really do very much. They eat, they sleep, they cry, and they poop. Occasionally they smile or coo, and as they get older and move from infant to toddler they start to move around more and show a good deal of interest in their surroundings, watching, even though they are still not doing much other than grabbing things and putting them into their mouth (see, eating) or moving things around with clumsy movements. Yet despite the fact that babies do not do very much–they are not able to communicate with us in a very precise way, even, hence the crying–it is easy to love babies because they are human beings even if they are not human doings.

One of the patterns about human identity is that in many languages, including both English and Spanish (the languages I know best), refer to human beings as human beings. This is perhaps so common of a thing that we do not stop to think about what it means. People are human beings not because of what they do, but because of who they are. We are not homo economicus, a being whose worth is decided by our economic productivity, though some people do confuse the worth of someone with their net worth. We instinctively, and properly, recognize that babies cannot really do anything. In general, most creatures are far more capable of movement than we are when they are born, and baby horses and deer, for example, are usually able to move around pretty well from within minutes of birth. Human beings are far different, and the age at which we develop independence is very late, becoming increasingly later at the present time, and highly dependent on exterior circumstances, most of which are hostile to the maturation and development process.

It should not be a surprise at all that babies are poop machines, but what does this mean? What is going on while babies are turning milk and baby foods into prodigious qualities of poop. We will set aside for the moment the implications of what is to be done with all that baby poop, though there are certainly valid environmental concerns for the rise of disposable baby diapers that can fill up space in landfills dramatically, as opposed to the way that babies were previously treated in such a way that involved different solutions to massive waste. What is going on inside of a baby while they are looking around at others? A great deal of development is going on under the surface. By observing those around them, babies get a sense for the kind of world they live in. They attach (or do not) to their mothers, they get a sense for the emotional thermostat of their families, they observe any other small beings who are just a bit larger and try to copy those around them. Their brains form connections that will lead to thought processes, habits, and reasoning that will last their whole lives. They take the raw materials of intellect and personality that they are born with and start to work on executing these tasks in the outside world that they exist in.

This interaction with the outside world is highly important. A great many of the capabilities that people have their entire life are formed when they are very young. Developmental delays can have serious consequences for small children. Thanks to the research of economist Thomas Sowell, for example, we know that many young children are wrongly labeled as being mentally handicapped because they have delayed speech as a result of brain development that focuses on mathematics first before switching over to developing language processing. This sort of labeling can have drastic negative effects on the well-being of able and talented and gifted children who are falsely labeled as slow because they are late in speaking. The ability of small children to experience a variety of things, textures, surfaces, and the like can help children develop strong capacities in being able to distinguish between qualities as they age, and can even help to prevent harmful allergies that result from an overly antiseptic early childhood environment that leads the bodies of small children to see too many things as hostile enemies rather than natural parts of the world around us.

Make no mistake, much of the messiness involved with babies and small children, as irritating as it can be to more cleanliness-minded adults, is very useful. We live in a messy world, and interacting with that messy world makes a mess. When babies play with dirt and sand and mud, they are learning about what the world is made of. The same is true when they learn how to gently deal with the animals that are around them, whether pets or animals that their parents may keep for economic purposes. Children learn what is normal and what is proper from what they see the people around them do. A great deal of very powerful implicit instruction is going on while babies look like they are not doing anything at all. The learning that they experience takes shape in the default way that they think, feel, and behave for the rest of their lives. Perhaps we sell babies too short and underestimate the importance of the sorts of things that they are observing us do and learning from us.

This learning and growth is noteworthy for at least two reasons for our current examination. For one, the very messiness of babies is itself in harmony with the messiness of life. However much people try to separate themselves from the ugliness of the facts of existence later on, as people seek to remove themselves for much of their lives from a recognition of the material facts of existence, we start life very closely connected to the physical processes that are necessary for life. There is genuine distress in seeing a fussy baby suffer because the adults around do not know what is going on inside the baby that makes its digestive system fail to work as well as it should. Those of us who have seen and cared about children who require a great deal of special attention because of the delicate state of their bodies, and the way that poor health can delay important childhood milestones have seen the distress and difficulties that babies and their families face in this situation.

I have seen a photo of a dear friend of mine who, at the age of one, was given a fancy birthday party by her mother, and her vacant stare into the camera reflected a high degree of puzzlement as to why she was having her photo taken in such an unnatural pose and situation. While it is not uncommon for people to see a photograph of a baby with an open mouth and a vacant expression, we know that at the beginning of life, at least, things are going on underneath the surface. For people, the time that is spent being a helpless and frequently inactive poop machine is time that is (hopefully) well spent in learning about who we are, how we are to behave, and what is the nature of the world around us. Learning these things successfully is vital to having a happy and meaningful life. It is regrettable that when people sometimes become poop machines at the end of life that there is not the same degree of useful processing going on under the surface. But for babies, at least, those poop factories are building for a lifetime of success and growth.