What if babies became adults after just one week of life?

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This thread is a spin-off from "How do you disipline a child who has Asperger's?". I posted something on it, which went like this:

Anyway, let's take this and run with it. What if childhood (and adolescence too) didn't exist? What if babies were born their normal baby size, but became full-grown adults in just one week (second day feels too creepy), complete with all the adult knowledge. The process of how this happens will be treated a "black box", a computer term for when you're not told about the inner workings of a program. This is borderline sci-fi, but bear with me; it could be an interesting discussion.

So, childhood as we know it wouldn't exist. Newborn babies would grow into adults in just one week. Parents wouldn't need to raise their children, except for keeping them safe for seven days, probably even less than that. Since childhood would be just a few days long, the parent/child power differential would be minimal, if existing at all. Adults wouldn't get to be in charge of their children for many years, like they do in real life. (Yes, I am touching on the power issue here.) Instead, they would have to treat them as an equal almost immediately, save for that one week. Would parenting seem as attractive if this was the case?

Of course, this would have enormous ramifications on the society at large. Manufacturers that make baby and child products would go out of business within months. McDonald's, Kellogs, Toys R Us, and other companies that advertise to children would have to make major changes in their business models. Schools would all close and be converted to office buildings or adult training centers. And a whole lot more I haven't thought of.

So, parents and non-parents, start posting your thoughts. It would be great to see what people think of all this.

I believe flies begin life full-sized, so maybe we could gain some insight from studying them?

Hmm seems interesting, but...

For me, the whole point of choosing to have a child is to experience the process of raising that child and watching it grow, slowly, over the course of 18+ years.

But I think it would be the perfect thing for people who just want to create a person to do extra work around the farm. Or for parents that are getting kinda old, and need to produce a younger person to take care of them as they age.

First off giving birth to a 6lb10 oz baby did so much damage I riped in to my inestine and almost died. So giving birth to a full grown or nearly full grown human wouldn't work out at all for the mothers we would all die in childbirth. So that wouldn't work at all given humans only have one child at a time for the most part we would have died off due to the math long ago. Second childhood is importan for learning more then just facts its for finding our place in the world. Having the time to play to discover what we a are good at and what we enjoy doing so this is what we can spend the rest of the 100 or so years we have left doing what we love or at lest not doing what we hate like P.E.

What about wisdom? The value of life experience?

OK, we're talking a purely hypothetical here, aren't we?

So. In your example, I only financially and emotionally support them for one week, correct? I'm just contributing to the continuation of the human race? And the cost is proportionate to it being 1 week instead of 18 - 22 years, ie a tiny fraction of what our kids now cost us? I'd do it. Its just one week of my life, after all.

But its hard to imagine having as much bond with that person. Love deepens and changes over time, and knowing that little baby won't need you as much tomorrow will keep you from investing so much emotionally in it (it is totally different knowing that day is a long way off). Kids are born small and cute because that makes adults want to care for them, and invest in them in terms of time, emotion and money. If they weren't small or cute, the theory goes, we wouldn't invest as much. So the question becomes, just how much will I invest in that one week, and how does that change how I'll interact with the grown child after that week?

I guess we're looking at knowledge being inherited rather than learned, right, like the instincts of animals that are born as essentially smaller adults?

Wow, that'd really change the world a great deal. The family unit is a large part of our lives today; that would probably change--people might not know or care who their parents were, because they were basically nine months of mild to moderate discomfort and a week of dependence to their mothers (who'd still be tired from birth and might simply leave the babies to be taken care of by professional child-caretakers while they recovered), and only the week to their fathers, if that. I'm thinking we wouldn't have marriage either, because the cultural purpose of marriage is to ensure that children grow up safely. The evolutionary purpose of love would also disappear; so that love would be relegated to friendships--possibly very close friendships--with romance having lost its purpose.

However, humans are still social creatures, unlike most reptiles; so that leaves us with an interesting quandary. People like to feel like they belong to something, and when families are gone, something still has to fill that need. Maybe there'd be people-groups, or even sub-species, depending on which knowledge and personality you inherited, and your place in society. For that matter, there might be rigid castes. Or, on the opposite end of things, there might be self-selected friendships, probably living together, with sex, pregnancy, and child-rearing only an incidental part of life. Chances are, we'd get heat cycles back, like many mammals have, to force us to make enough children (having lost the romantic motivation for sex).

Gender would probably matter a lot less, and people mightn't care much about whether you were male or female. Gender differences would begin to blend into androgyny, mattering only when baby-making is necessary. Our language would probably reflect that, with the addition of a gender-neutral pronoun used for people, and gender turned into an adjective rather than a pronoun. (Ex., "That male person," rather than, "he", when gender needed to be mentioned at all.) Pregnancy and birth would be the only things that separated males from females; and chances are, females, without the obvious physical differences and the need to raise children in a hunter-gatherer society, would have long ago achieved equality.

It'd be a very different, alien world. People would have to choose their relationships, or society would choose their relationships for them, without ever relying on family ties.

I remembered this idea last night after picking up, cleaning, helping with soup eating of my 5yo. Sometimes can't wait for him to grow up so I can have some time to read a book or just to stare at the wall. Not to mention all the scare his growing up giving me, constant fear of abductions/abuses, falling or minor or major illnesses. I admit the later will never stop.

I think that, despite this "imaginary child/adult"'s size, it would still have years of knowledge to acquire, and for that a parent would be needed.

The thing I find funny is that this sounds like it is written by a person who is not a parent (not sure if that's true), because, as a parent, I know that it really only takes a day or two for you to realize that this person IS a person. The babe has it's own feelings, expressions, opinions, likes, dislikes, joys and aggrivations.
It is very apparent, by the end of the first week, that this baby isn't just a cute little bundle but a very real PERSON.

Just small, and hungry, and exhausted, and confused.

Actually, in this hypothetical, sci-fi scenario, the baby would attain all the adult characteristics in one week. This includes knowledge, both intellectual and common sense, that most 21-year-olds have. Don't think about how it works; this is a black box process (look in the first post to see what "black box" means). Maybe it's through memory implants, but this is outside the scope of this discussion.

You're right, I'm not a parent. I came up with this to see if parenting would seem as attractive if children didn't have a long growing up period. There would be no experiencing of joy from watching one's children grow up, no ability to watch them develop talents, and at the same time, no time to be in charge of them and be able to tell them what to do. Hence, this scenario. As some of you who've seen a lot of my posts might have guessed, for most of my childhood, it was my dream to go into some sort of accelerated aging machine, and fast-forward my life to age 20 or so, thus bypassing childhood and adolescence in their entirety.

I think the whole concept of "parenting" would cease to exist. There would be giving birth and that would be pretty much it. Since everybody would be instant adults and have no time to form family relationships, there also wouldn't be any concept of "family". There would be people who have similar DNA but that's about it. Instead, I think social relationships would revolve around co-workers. Since a person would be ready to join the work force in a week after birth, the people they worked with would be their primary relationship. Instead of childhood memories, people would have "first job" memories. Instead of people being shaped by the family dynamics they grow up with, they would be shaped by the co-worker dynamics of their first job. Like Callista said, there probably wouldn't be any actual maternal relationship because recovery from childbirth would occupy the woman's time until her "child" was an adult (and probably for some time after, it takes a while to recover) so that week of caretaking would be done by professionals.

Back to what prompted this hypothetical scenario: I think you have a misunderstanding of parental power and control. It isn't something that (most) parents revel in. It's a necessary byproduct of the fact that parents are completely responsible for their children. This responsibility can't be met without exerting at least some control. Parents who fail to do this will find themselves in legal trouble for neglect. For me, exerting power and control is the least enjoyable aspect of parenting. But I have to do it because it's my responsibility to make sure that my daughter easts something other than sugar, goes to school and all the other things in her life that I am required to control. It would be easier for me to not try to control that. But it would be shirking my responsibility and not only would it be immoral to give up that control, Child Protective Services would be knocking on my door in due time. There are parents who go overboard on the control. They micromanage and this micromanaging (the infamous "helicopter parents") may be what you are reacting to. But I suspect even the "helicopter parents" who exert too much control are doing it because they think they are supposed to, not because they enjoy it.