I have two young girls, and thanks to one of them especially, I see a lot of tears. In fact I see more tears in one week than I saw in my entire childhood from all the combined members of my family. I see her cry more about getting up in the morning than I saw my whole family cry when my grandmother got cancer. Maybe that says more about us than her. Some tears were shed, and I have an aunt and uncle who are a bit more passionate, and I recall my grandfather crying briefly while praying over the family dinner. But overall we’re not a people to weep much.

Seeing crying so much now, and having it as a fairly new experience in my life, has made made me think more than I previously had about something that to most people seems fairly familiar and explicable. Crying. Why do children cry?

The basic answer is obvious. Communication. Human babies are born criers. You might say that it’s their first language. So what are they saying? They’re sending a signal that says (to whoever cares to listen): “Help! Someone care about me! I’m in distress! I’ve encountered a problem that I don’t understand and can’t handle, and I need someone to negotiate it for me. I don’t understand and I can’t handle it. I am overwhelmed.”

Then, if there is a parent nearby to receive the signal, the parent comes in with their greater intelligence and capability, and they negotiate that problem for the child. They send the signal: “Hush, child, momma is here to take care of it, you don’t have to be distressed.” The child calms down (presumably) as the problem is resolved, and the parent is calmed as the child ceases their distress. It’s a cycle, it’s communication. Pre-verbal, but perfectly functional. The adults know what it means, they understand, and the child understands too.

And that’s a key thing to keep in mind. Crying and distress signals aren’t a one-way street, it’s a two-way interplay between a parent and their developing offspring. It’s not all demand, it’s also response, and eventually negotiation. At some point, children are supposed to grow up and become adults. That seems to be the general trend and aim of biology, and as yet parents haven’t developed perpetual vigor to allow them to care for perpetual children. Instead, there is a dialogue that gradually draws children into awareness of the need for and the development of their own capabilities.

Sometimes as a parent you don’t respond to crying, at least not by immediately intervening. You’re sending a signal back to your child. And that’s signal says, this isn’t the kind of thing you should expect someone to help you with, this is the sort of thing you can ignore or deal with. And maybe they cry about it for a while, but at some point they have to actually deal with the problem themselves or learn to live with it as part of life. Parents model a response, with their faces, their tone of voice, their body language, how quickly and with what attitude they respond, even before words can begin to do their work to help explain the reasoning. Their parent may be showing the child something about the kind of problem with their reaction, that it’s something the child has to face, or showing them something about the child themselves, that you have reached the point in life where you can or should be able to deal with this in the normal course of your life. You are capable and therefore responsible. Your solution exists inside, not outside. But if you make no room for such dialogue and development, the opportunities will be curtailed.

Sometimes in life you’ll see a very large child or even an adult displaying these same signals. Some of that comes down to temperament, and some comes down to training, or opportunities for development. It’s very likely that they weren’t given the sort of feedback that helps a child learn to distinguish which situations they are capable of handling and how they should react to them. They kept getting external responses and interventions for their problems, so they never matured and internalized their parent’s competence or developed their own capabilities. They never learned to exercise those mental muscles. They’re still trying to use the shortcut of a distress signal, alerting the authorities. Fix this for me or I’ll throw a fit.

This approach works for infants, because their parents like them and want to help them, and an infant is justified in taking that kind of attitude. We don’t expect infants to be able to handle everything they encounter. But as they get older they signal us and we signal back and we keep each other informed of what we feel they can and can’t handle. The child shows hesitancy, the parent responds by either affirming the child’s instinctive response or educating it. One of the hardest things a parent has to teach a child is: “You won’t always need me.” That’s a scary lesson for both child and parent, and one that wise parents try to explain if they can. “This might seem like difficult or scary a thing, but you’re going to be able to handle this; you’re at the level of this task now. Maybe I can help you, but in the future it’s mostly you that can and will need to solve this.” This lessom puts a limit on the usefulness of the parent by emphasizing the usefulness of the child’s own inner resources.

When you see an older child or adult display the same instinctive distress responses that are endemic to infancy, that’s a problem. Partly because it’s obvious that it’s not developmentally appropriate. Also, because an older child (and how much more an adult) has lost the weapons that infants and toddlers naturally possess to get you on their side and provoke your sympathetic infant-response. Youth and helplessness are so clearly displayed in physical markers we can all recognize, from pitch of voice to chubby, big-eyed faces. Those features change how we judge the person producing those signals. We give them more credit, we are prejudiced toward them. We don’t have the same expectations we would have for an adult to be equally capable. We are more willing to let them exploit us and be incompetent.

But an older child or adult who tries to pull off the same stunt appears kind of monstrous. And it generates different kind of tension in other people, especially parents. Because you’re looking at an older child, and everything about them is sending a signal that here is a little human, not an infant. But they’re sending you infant signals. If that happens a lot, that can make you resent them, or resent yourself. And it’s not easy to say what you’ll do with that feeling. Maybe your child likes being an infant, maybe you even like it. But on some level you know that your signals are all messed up.

And here’s why. Infants are small. They’re very demanding, but they’re small. Their needs aren’t enormous, and their lives are very limited, so there are definitive limits to what they can demand from you. And they’re very young; they’re in a very limited and transitory phase of life. They’re growing and changing constantly, gaining new capabilities on a rapid basis. They’re uniquely, temporarily helpless and uniquely, rapidly growing out of it.

When you see an older child or adult who still presents an an infant, you’re seeing a massive problem. A far larger entity with much larger needs and demands and complexity, who isn’t going to grow or change nearly as much as they did when they were an infant, whose life has much wider limits and who can get into some serious trouble. Yet their capability and need for you to provide for them hasn’t changed to reflect any of that. They haven’t increased their own ability to solve their own problems or carry their own weight. When a baby is little, carrying them around all day strapped to you is tough, but it’s doable because they don’t weigh a lot or move around a lot; they sleep a lot, they eat occasionally. Their life is small and their needs are small. So it’s fine if they don’t contribute at all. Now imagine trying to do that with an 8 year old. You need them to be able to stand on their own two feet at that age, literally. Their cost to carry has grown exponentially, and so either they have to start carrying some of that weight themselves, or they’re going to crush you under it.

As a parent, when you look at a child like that, you’re seeing a failure. You failed to produce a viable human that can support itself and care for itself, you’ve created a baby that never developed into what all babies are supposed to become. An adult. So it’s a failure. There’s no way they could survive without you. The only reason they’re surviving now is because of you, or at least that’s what their crying and distress behavior is telling you. I’m an infant, care for me because I can’t handle life. And you’re old and they’re young. They’re meant to outlast you. You’re not going to get stronger with time; you’re going to get weaker. Their weight is going to increase year by year, while every year your strength diminishes.

That’s really bad news to get about an eight-year-old, or worse, eighteen-year-old. They haven’t developed. You’re stuck with a perpetual infant whose needs and demands are now enormous and growing every day. You’re going to have to fight the whole world for them, unless you can keep them captive and confined and tied to your apron strings. And that is itself a kind of cruelty, although it a perfectly understandable response. Make them live like infants close to the breast and you can at least reduce the crushing burden of caring for an adult infant.

Getting those signals of infantilism, while at the same time seeing the obvious signs of maturity, can produce a natural kind of revulsion. You’re not supposed to be getting both of those signals at the same time. And that can make your resent your child, even if you choose to keep them captive as a pampered perpetual prisoner. And it can make you resent yourself, because you failed, and you know it. You know you shouldn’t be seeing maturity and infantile signals at the same time, not on a regular basis. You look at them and you realize two things. My child can’t survive. They’re in trouble That’s a very distressing thought. And your second thought is, my child can’t survive without me. And they’re way more than a child now. I’m in trouble.

Everyone runs into situations occasionally that reduce us to that position and cause of distress, and we reach out and let people see our distress. But we’re not like that all the time. We don’t establish an infantile identity. People know to steer clear of other humans who are doing that. Because that’s a burden you can’t and shouldn’t have to carry. That’s a weight that could take you down with it. Because life is already pretty hard and you’re already carrying the weight of your own struggles. And you won’t have the excess capacity available to help those who really need it (for exceptional reasons) if you’ve already spent yourself into exhaustion carrying a 150 pound infant. And you will deprive those who truly need the help of whatever you might have had to give, and as well whatever your child might have had to give if they had become strong.

Sometimes we forget that man is mortal and man is finite. There is only so much you can carry. And there is only so long that you will be around to carry it. Children must grow into adults, and adults must age into dotards eventually, and fail, and die. In the long run, you can’t opt out of growing up and more than you can opt our of aging or death. You might take a pass on it, but it won’t leave you alone in the end. The day will come when you, as a weakened and failing vine, will reach for the hand of your children, hoping to find the strong and reassuring hand of an adult to hold you and comfort you and keep you safe in your sunset infancy. And woe and sorrow will greet those who find no hand, or who meet another shaking hand meeting their own, as desperate and needy and confused as that which seeks it. That is the lesson that the demands of mortality try to teach us through the changes of maturity. You are more than just a child, more than just a helpless and vulnerable and uncomprehending infant. You are needed. You have a destiny. It makes demands of you because they are demands you could rise to fulfill. There is a future calling to you, asking you to rise to meet it.