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Why Is Infancy Considered Special?
Infancy Is Always Called a Special Period
The period from birth to around one or two years of age is repeatedly emphasized in developmental psychology, psychiatry, and parenting discourse.
It is often followed by statements like, “Everything is decided in this period.”
But is that really true?
Is infancy special because it is more important than any other stage of life?
Why Infancy Is Said to Be Special
The main reason infancy draws so much attention is the speed and density of development.
During this time, neural connections in the brain increase explosively, while sensory, motor, emotional, and attachment systems form simultaneously.Before language is available, a human being absorbs the world as a whole.
Another defining feature is total dependency.
Infants cannot regulate their own emotions or choose their environments.
Safety, rhythm, stability, and expectations of others are entirely supplied from the outside.What children learn at this stage is not specific events,
but a pre-linguistic worldview:“What kind of place is the world?”
“What are others to me?”
Learning That Is Not Remembered
Most experiences in infancy do not remain as explicit memories — at least not in forms we can consciously describe.
What remains instead are bodily reactions, emotional patterns, and regulatory styles of the nervous system.That is why, even in adulthood, we sometimes experience moments like:
Feeling anxious for no clear reason,
or finding our bodies tensing up before we can explain why.These are not signs of weak will or flawed character.
They are the activation of response structures formed before language existed.
Is Infancy More Important Than Other Periods?
Here a crucial distinction is needed.
Infancy does not determine everything.
But it does influence the direction and cost of later development.An easy analogy is ground construction.
A weak foundation does not make it impossible to build a structure —
but it does require more reinforcement and long-term crack management.For this reason, modern developmental psychology calls infancy not a critical period but a sensitive period.
Another Violence Created by Determinism
As the importance of infancy is overemphasized, parents may be burdened with excessive responsibility,
while individuals may be branded with the stigma of “it is already too late.”But the human brain retains plasticity throughout life.
Through relationships, environment, therapy, and learning, regulatory patterns can be reorganized.Infancy is only a starting point.
It is not a period that delivers final verdicts on an entire life.
Rethinking Infancy
What makes infancy special is not its rank in importance,
but the uniqueness of its formative process.Worldviews shaped before language,
relationships experienced before choice,
and nervous system rhythms formed before will.Understanding infancy is not about imprisoning someone in their past,
but about making present struggles explainable.Infancy may have ended —
but human capacity for change has not.
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[Netflix When Life Gives You Tangerines Review #10] The Person Who Tried to Be Loved Until the Very End
A Child for Whom Being Loved Was Everything
From an early age, Geum-myeong learned how to be loved.
Her parents provided clean clothes, careful words, and a protected environment so she would not be wounded by the world.
She had never been allowed to feel lacking.But love does not grow inside a greenhouse.
The world is always calculated, imperfect, and rough.
She was never taught how to endure that imperfection.Those who learn only how to be loved
collapse too easily when love begins to shake.
The Deficiency Created by Parental Excess
Geum-myeong’s parents were not bad people.
They were simply people who lived the world on their daughter’s behalf.“You don’t have to do that.”
“Our Geum-myeong doesn’t need to suffer.”Those words were warm —
and at the same time, cruel.
They took away her ability to judge for herself.She became someone who had to make only “correct choices,”
and eventually lost the ability to speak her own desires.So even in love, she searched for the right answer rather than the other person’s feelings.
“Is this the right kind of love?”
“Is this what a good woman should be?”She treated love as an ethical problem.
She Knew Feelings — But Not Relationships
Geum-myeong was emotionally rich,
but that richness did not turn into relational depth.She expressed love well,
but the moment her partner’s feelings deviated from her internal standards, she became confused.Not because she was selfish —
but because she had never learned to accept the complexity of relationships.Her parents always understood her.
Failure was immediately covered with, “It’s okay, it’s not your fault.”So in relationships, if the other person did not fully understand her,
she would feel that love had cooled.Geum-myeong was not someone who gave love —
she was someone who needed love to be confirmed.
The First Day Outside the Sterile Room, the World Was Too Rough
Marriage is ultimately a negotiation with another person.
But Geum-myeong chose persuasion instead of negotiation.She confronted her mother-in-law without understanding the nature of the conflict.
It was not a generational issue,
but the unfamiliar struggle of someone who had never established a self.She said “no” to the world for the first time —
but she was not ready to bear the world that comes after saying no.In the end, love collapsed.
She blamed the world, and the world called her “an unruly woman.”In truth, she was not unruly —
she was simply trying to live for the first time.
Real Love Is Not Being Loved — It Is Surviving
Geum-myeong failed.
But that failure was perhaps inevitable.A child raised in a sterile room cannot become fully human without colliding with the dust of the world.
She succeeded in being loved —
but failed to grow within love.That is both her tragedy
and the beginning of her hope.Those who try to be loved until the very end
meet themselves only after losing love.
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Why Nature Produces More of the “Less Stable Sex”
We are usually taught something like this:
The X chromosome contains far more genes than the Y chromosome.
Therefore, the XX configuration is biologically more stable than XY.In reality, male infants have higher rates of stillbirth, infant mortality, congenital disorders, developmental disabilities, and accidental death.
At this point, a natural question arises:
“Then why does nature produce more of the less stable sex?”
“Why is the natural sex ratio always slightly male-biased?”This is neither coincidence nor cultural artifact.
Nature maintains this structure deliberately and consistently.
The Stable Sex and the Unstable Sex
The female XX structure is genetically stable.
Even if one X carries a recessive defect, the other X acts as a buffer.
As a result, women generally live longer, fall ill less often, and develop more stably.Males are different.
In the XY structure, any defect on the single X is expressed directly.
Thus male infants die more frequently and are filtered out more often from the very beginning.Structurally, they are different:
- Female = a stable preservation structure
- Male = a structure exposed to variation
This is not merely a difference — it is a difference of role.
Males as the “Variation-Experiment Slot”
Nature does not consider individual happiness.
Nature considers only one thing:“How quickly and how efficiently is this species’ genetic information optimized?”
The most efficient system for this goal is simple:
- The stable sex preserves the genes.
- The unstable sex absorbs variation.
Therefore, males are structurally designed to:
- express more mutations
- die more frequently
- be filtered more aggressively
It may appear cruel, but within the evolutionary system, males function as the experimental group slot.
That Is Why Nature Produces More Males
Here the problem emerges: males are structurally filtered out more often.
So what must be done?They must be produced in greater numbers from the beginning.
Nature therefore:
- produces more male infants at birth
- filters more of them during growth
- and equalizes the numbers by adulthood
In actual statistics, the sex ratio at birth is roughly 105–107 males per 100 females,
but by age one it approaches 1:1, and in adulthood females become the majority.This is not coincidence — it is a result of systemic design.
Why Not Simply Increase the Number of Females?
Increasing females would actually be inefficient.
The limiting factor of reproduction is not the number of males but the number of females.Females represent high-cost reproductive assets — pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving.
Nature therefore manages females as preservation assets.Males, by contrast, can be:
- increased
- reduced
- experimented upon
- and filtered out
This structure is the cheapest, fastest, and most efficient.
Natural Sex Ratio Is Not Cruelty — It Is a System
Nature is not fair.
Nature is not warm.
Nature only optimizes.That is why this structure exists:
- preserve the stable
- experiment with the unstable
- produce the experimental group in excess
They are produced in excess because they are weak.
They are produced in excess because they can be discarded.That is the real reason slightly more males are born —
and it is one of the coldest design principles of the world we live in.
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