Derek Thompson

And there's something really beautiful about this idea that being a parent therefore means falling in love with the sequence of strangers that keep reappearing behind your child's face.

And I think an indelible part of parenthood, an indelible part of enjoying parenthood, is...

Making peace with that inevitable change.

I think there may be a larger lesson here about if you can make peace with the changes intrinsic to your child, then maybe you can make peace with the changes that are intrinsic to life and to being alive.

But that I think is like probably like the deepest and most true thing about parenting is that your kids are this sort of sequence of strangers that never stop changing.

And I think that's kind of beautiful.

Yeah, I think it's a lovely thought.

You know, my wife and I might adopt in the future, and I've thought about that, right?

Like, how does a parent think about a biological child versus an adopted child?

But I think your experience is probably instructive and probably very common.

You know, I don't think people are—this is like an evolutionary psych thought, so some people will hate it and some people might not hate it, but, like, I don't think we're meant to do that many things.

We're built to eat.

We're built to drink.

We're built to reproduce, certainly.

The genes don't survive without that.

We're built to stay alive.

But one of the things we're clearly built to do, one thing the species could not survive without, we are built to fall in love with our children.

If we didn't, if it were hard to fall in love with your child,

you and I wouldn't be here because this species would have died out millions of years ago.

I think loving your child, I think it's certainly a blessing of natural selection that loving your child is easy.