We hear that there’s a new royal baby or that a Kardashian is pregnant and we absolutely lose it. We find ourselves obsessing over babies we have no connections with.
It kind of makes sense to obsess over actual celebrities because they have developed personalities and canons of work for us to be fans of, but why do we gush over their babies? I found myself wondering this after wanting to know more about all of the recent celebrity baby news. For some reason, we all want to know the sexes and names of new celebrity babies and scour gossip sites to find out as soon as we can.
When I tried to find some clarity on why we obsess so much about celebrity babies, there really wasn’t much out there. Mainly, I found people ranting about how dumb our celebrity obsessions. However, a CNN article written by Lisa Respers France in 2010 chalked it up to our culture’s obsession with babies in general.
Although motherhood is becoming less expected of women, people still find it strange when women don’t have children. We tend to feel sad for women who never have children and assume that something is missing from their lives even though many people can live perfectly happy lives without having babies.
When celebrities have babies, they’re fulfilling one of our societal norms. When people do what they’re expected to, there isn’t usually a big fuss. For some reason, we make an exception and fuss over babies, especially celebrity babies. It’s been suggested that humans are hardwired to be nurturing to those who can’t fend for themselves. Based on how lovingly we care for our young and our compassion for others, this could be why we fawn over strangers’ babies.
Another explanation for our fascination is we use celebrities and their babies to distract ourselves from our own stressful lives. With all of the horrible things happening in the world, cute babies are the perfect distraction.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause for obsessing over celebrity babies, but at least it makes people happy. Still, it is pretty weird when you really think about it.