Jerry Banfield

Why is it every baby I see looks perfect? When does that change? As a scientist, I think it is critical to establish a clear point of "birth" or "death" where the perfection in a child becomes transformed or forgotten into something else that we then end up calling a person, an employee, a statistic, a criminal, a success story, or any of the other labels we apply to each other that seem more important than everything else. For example, my daughter now is a year and four months. Seeing her shows me all of the beauty of the world as does seeing any other baby. If in 30 years she is talking to her therapist about her problems, when would the change have happened from the baby I see now into the person being described to the shrink? I ask this after having went through the exact same change. 30 years after being a beautiful baby love to my mother, I was talking to a rector at my church explaining all of the sins I believed made up who I was. He helped me see my essential nature had never changed and that