Being disgusted is normal. Even from the babies’ own feces. But there is a crucial moment when parents no longer have that feeling.
The level of disgust parents feel appears to change over time.
Science says that disgust is a sensation that evolved as a way to avoid pathogens, such as those found in feces or vomit, as a kind of “behavioral immune system”.
To learn more about this phenomenon of “children’s diaper disgust”, a group of scientists recruited 99 parents and 50 “non-parents”, aged between 18 and 73, in the US and the UK.
As detailed by , almost half of parents had babies who wore diapers, most of whom changed at least two diapers a day.
Participants completed a normalized disgust scale – which asked them to rate their reactions to things like seeing a cockroach or touching a dead cat – as well as parenting-related issues like changing diapers close to dinner.
Next, the researchers tested participants’ disgust behavior by measuring how long they looked at a repulsive image — like vomit or dirty diapers — compared to a more neutral image, like a sleeping dog or a bowl of fruit.
In the study, whose conclusions were recently published in PsyArXivresearchers described that parents of babies who had already been weaned felt less disgust than those who were not parents and parents whose babies were still consuming only liquids.
That is, parents they stop finding diapers disgusting when babies start eating solid foods.
Another finding of the study is that later acceptance of disgusting substances after weaning may allow for a slight decrease in parental protective barriers, which could help prepare children’s immune systems.
“These findings are fascinating and shed light on how disgust helps us face life’s challenges,” he told New Scientist. Hannah Bergof the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was not involved in the new research.
“It is disgust system You can self-modulate in an impressively nuanced way to meet the demands of parenting: doing the often dirty work of raising a baby, while keeping yourself and your child safe, and helping your child to develop your own strong immune system,” he added.
