Infants’ helplessness demonstrates unique social implications for human development. In a new paper developmental psychology researchers from the University of Ottawa explored human infants' helplessness as a key to human nature, delving into questions of why humans evolved unlike other mammals with strong sensory systems and weak motor systems for an extended period. And they looked at what this means for human development and the survival of our species.
Lead author Stuart Hammond , an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, discusses this latest research published in Child Development Perspectives .
QUESTION: Has developmental science overlooked human helplessness?
STUART HAMMOND: There is a recent narrative framing humanity, and especially masculinity, about strength and independence. In this view especially, dependence is weakness. Unlike “super precocial” species, humans have evolved and develop to depend on each other.
Human infant helplessness is striking because a species becoming more helpless seems to run against survival. For anthropologists, there is an interest in understanding when in human evolutionary history aspects of helplessness began to appear, and its role in explaining why humans are such an adaptable species, capable of social collaboration and cultural innovation.
Q: Why has helplessness been overlooked with babies, specifically?
SH: We see several reasons from the term helplessness having negative connotations to being a byproduct of the “obstetrical dilemma,” where humans must give birth at a time when the infant’s head is small enough to exit the birth canal. The two main competing theories in developmental psychology are nativism (infants are born with ideas) and empiricism (infants are born a blank slate) are unable to make much of helplessness. There is a third approach, constructivism, focused on infants as agents, in which helplessness could be more interesting.
Q: How unique is human helplessness within the animal world?
SH: Animal newborns are classified on a spectrum of more altricial (weak sensory and motor systems like a rat) and more precocial (strong sensory and motor systems like a horse). Humans, meanwhile, have altricial motor traits and precocial sensory traits. This combination of traits makes human helplessness unique.
Q: What are the implications of this uniqueness?
SH: Humans are born with well-developed sensory systems but slowly develop fine and gross motor skills. Babies need to rely heavily on their primary caregivers and communities for basic survival needs, resulting in complex caregiver-infant social interactions for an extended period. But babies are exercising keen attention to the world around them and are in both small and large ways contributing to those communities.
Q: How should researchers rethink infant helplessness and its impact on human development?
SH: In psychology, there is a long tradition of looking for development in a very direct way. The helplessness perspective is different because the focus is on the possibilities that constrain the ways that the human infant, and its caregivers, must interact to survive, and how some aspects of psychological development will flow from these possibilities. Morality may reliably emerge in humans because of infants and parents are bound in relationships of care, even though helplessness is not itself a form of morality.
Q: What type of impact will this research have?
SH: We hope the public will look at human infants’ helplessness differently. Babies may not be able to move around in the world, but infants are unique in having their eyes and ears open, and in developing in a longer period of care. It could be that this period of helplessness is important to making us who we are as a species.
Child Development Perspectives
Observational study
People
The evolution of human infants’ helplessness: unique, relational, and long-lasting developmental implications
7-Jan-2026