Love removal machine

Having spent three days stuck in airports the past week, I've had a lot of opportunity to observe crying babies in their natural habitat, and you know what? Babies love mobile phones.

I began to suspect this a few months ago when I saw two normally friendly babies in a hilarious knockdown, dragout fight over a Sony-Ericsson that was the same model owned by both their mothers. My sister no longer even bothers looking for her mobile, but simply asks her 2-year old where it is. So after I saw the third harried mother in the airport wordlessly hand over her mobile to quiet a screaming toddler, I figured I should start writing the Nature cover story. But I can't find anything on the web about the phenomenon except videos and toys confirming its basic truth. So it falls to me to make up an entertaining explanantion.

I suspect that babies love mobiles for a number of reasons: interactivity, good hand (and mouth) feel. But toy phones also have those qualities and I've never seen a baby willing to trade a Nokia for a Hasbro. In fact, it has to be mommy or daddy's Nokia, which indicates that the main attraction isn't physical or perceptual, but social. Babies see the intimacy and emotion that their parents pour into their phones and they want to extract it. They are soothed by the love with which the phone is impregnated. That's my stuck-in-O'Hare-at-3AM theory, anyway.

Comments

[josh]

I think it's also a bit of watching their parents talking into the thing and realizing that it must be quite important. Our 1 year-old isn't so much soothed by the phone as perplexed by it. We tried buying a kiddie version of a mobile, and after pushing the buttons for 10 seconds, he tossed it aside and pointed back at mine. He shoves it at his mouth with a monotone growl, not to eat it, but because he's trying in his way to mimic our act of talking. Probably a version of his current developmental stage, but if we weren't talking into it I know he wouldn't care much about it.

[Jeffre Jackson]

Whenever I see babies with mobiles, I'm always reminded of the requisite "they're just like us" scene in zombie movies where the zombies perform reflexive, groaning parodies of human behavior when presented with familiar objects. (But then I'm not a parent myself yet.)

What is it that makes the mobile such an interesting, important, perplexing object versus the other objects he sees you using every day? Why do they seem more eager to talk to/through an object than to other people? What type of importance does our behavior invest the phone with?

[Jinal Shah]

Couldn't agree more. My niece won't even look at her toy phones.
Love the name of your blog !

[Emily]

Or like when your cat walks over your keyboard as you type.

[Soraya]

Being a mother myself and having to handle the Sony Ericsson everytime the thing is at sight's distance of the baby, please sign me up to the list of people who really need to understand this one soon...she's broken two phones already and now, she does not like the old broken one(which I innocently tried to handle instead of the useful, office-paid one).

[SimmonsSocorro18]

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