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[Children’s Perspective Lab] To understand the mysterious creature known as “children,” we tried becoming babies ourselves
"Mom, your face is big. Since I'm two now, if I get even older, will my face get as big as Mom's?"
This was a comment from my son, who was two years old at the time. For a moment, I thought he was calling my face big—but that wasn’t it.
"Could this mean that my child has now developed a concept of 'past and future'?"
He had turned two, and he understood that there was a future beyond that age.
“Until yesterday, there was only the present—a single point in time…” I was surprised and moved, and at the same time, it suddenly struck me. How many times had I forced my son—a child who could only grasp the present as a single point—to accept statements he couldn’t possibly understand, like “Snack is later, later” or “We’ll go to the park tomorrow”?
Normally, when I create advertisements, I pompously say things like “putting myself in the consumer’s shoes” or “from the target audience’s perspective,” yet as a parent, I’ve never even tried to understand how a toddler feels or what’s going on inside their little brain.
“No, it’s not too late. I want to know.”
If we could understand children from their own perspective, wouldn’t we force fewer unreasonable demands on them? Wouldn’t we be able to avoid getting frustrated or losing our temper with them, and improve the relationship between society and children?
So, together with Mitsuhiro Kutsukake—a dad and art director who spends his days intently observing the mysteries of his 0-year-old child, wondering, “How does this child see me?” and “I hear a baby’s vision is different from an adult’s”—I launched the “Child’s Perspective Lab” to see the world through a child’s eyes.
It’s a lab where we seriously yet enjoyably research what it’s like to see the world from a child’s perspective. However, since babies and toddlers can’t participate in group interviews, we have no choice but to become them ourselves, experience it firsthand, and conduct our research by asking, “Isn’t it like this?” So, here’s our very first study.
What if an adult became a baby’s head?
We decided to create a “Baby Head” that allows adults to experience what it’s like to have a baby’s head. It is said that a newborn’s head is about four times the size of their body, and the head accounts for about 30% of their body weight (※1). If we apply that to a man who is 180 cm tall and weighs 70 kg,
“the head would be 45 centimeters long and weigh a whopping 21 kilograms.”
. Our model is Kutsukake-kun’s son, Seita-kun.
With the cooperation of Dentsu Live Inc. and Kukan Geijutsu-sha, the “Baby Head” is steadily taking shape. At first, it looked like a middle-aged man with a baby’s face, but by adjusting the size of the eyes and the redness of the cheeks, it has come to resemble Haruta-kun. When I tried it on, it was quite heavy. If we made it any heavier, my neck might snap… We decided it was too dangerous to reproduce that level of weight.
We took the Baby Head to visit the University of Tokyo’s Baby Lab
Armed with the finished Baby Head, we visited Professor Kazuo Kai at the University of Tokyo’s Baby Lab, with whom we had been consulting for some time about the “Child’s Perspective Lab.” Professor Kai is a leading expert in infant studies. He uses the Preference Gaze Method (※2) to analyze babies’ preferences and is the creator of best-selling picture books like *Moimoi* and *Urushi*, which truly delight babies. These are picture books created from a child’s perspective!
*2 = Preference Gaze Method
A method in which multiple options are presented, and the one the infant looks at the longest is measured.
Ishida: Professor, I made a baby head.
Mr. Kai (hereinafter referred to as “Sensei”): T-that’s scary. The face is cute, though. It’s this big. Can I try it on for a second?
Ishida: Wow, I can’t believe you’re actually trying it on yourself, Sensei!
Teacher: It’s heavy… How much does this weigh?
Kutsukake: It’s currently 1.5 kilograms. Theoretically, it should be 21 kilograms, but that would be too dangerous to wear.
Teacher: This is amazing. I can see why there are those sad news stories about kids leaning out from balconies and falling. It’s really hard to keep your balance with this on. I’m experiencing it for the first time myself. Even though I knew it intellectually, it’s surprisingly heavy when you actually put it on. 21 kilos, you say?
Ishida: Yes. My son just turned six, and he weighs exactly 21 kilograms right now. When you think about it, it’s like living with a six-year-old on your head—it’s just mind-boggling…
Teacher: Wow, that’s amazing (laughs). It really makes you realize just how incredible it is that a baby with a head this big can roll over, stand up, and hold its head up. It requires an incredible sense of balance.
Ishida: I read in your book that a baby’s brain accounts for about one-seventh of their total body weight (Note 3). Is it that heavy because we’re human?
Professor: I think monkeys and whales have heavy brains too, but in terms of body weight ratio—or rather, relative to their own bodies—the human brain is exceptionally heavy.
*3 Source: *The Mysteries of Babies* (by Kazuo Kai / Iwanami Shinsho)
Ishida: Why do babies even come into the world with such big heads in the first place?
Professor: This is actually considered a small size. Since humans walk upright, our birth canal is narrower than that of other animals. That’s why babies are born while still immature, with smaller heads, so they can pass through it.
Ishida: So, does that mean they’re born much earlier than other animals?
Professor: That’s right. If they waited until they were as developed as zebras or deer—which can stand immediately after birth—they wouldn’t be able to pass through the birth canal. Because they’re born small and underdeveloped, they come into contact with the outside world and their parents earlier than other animals, receiving stimulation. They can learn. That is
“creates our humanity,”
, and I agree with that view.
Kutsukake: I’ve heard that when babies are born, their vision isn’t as developed as their sense of touch or hearing.
Doctor: Hmm. They say hearing develops while they’re still in the womb, but I don’t think it’s exactly the same as an adult’s. I do think their sense of touch develops relatively early. That’s because they can touch themselves inside the womb and learn from it. With modern 4D ultrasounds, you can even see them sucking on a pacifier while they’re still in there.You can’t suck your thumb unless you know what your body is like, right? It’s not like they just happen to grab a finger that’s there and pop it in their mouth. They bring their hand to their mouth, and before that, they open their mouth to get ready. I think they’re learning by trying out all sorts of things like that inside the womb.
In contrast, visual information is fundamentally different from what’s outside the womb. The amount of light is different, and they don’t know where to look. In that sense, it’s true that they’re born without having had a chance to train their vision.
Kutsukake: I see—that’s fascinating.
Ishida: Changing the subject, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while. In your lab, you’re conducting an experiment titled “Babies Prefer Heroes,” right?
Professor: Yes. We created an animation featuring characters like a bully, a victim of bullying, a hero who stops the bullying, and a bystander who doesn’t intervene, and we examined the babies’ reactions to the hero and the bystander. We found that many babies prefer the hero.
Ishida: After conducting the experiment, did you really feel that babies have a sense of morality?
Professor: If you’re asking whether the babies look at the bullies and think, “This guy’s a bad guy, so I want to beat him up,” well, no, they don’t (laughs).
If we could just ask them, “Which one do you like? Which one is the bad guy?” there’d be no need for an experiment. It’s interesting precisely because we can’t ask them. That’s why our experiments—measuring brain activity and tracking what they look at for longer—are meaningful.
That said, experiments like this tend to yield similar results no matter who conducts them. It’s hard to explain exactly why, but if a group were made up entirely of mean people, they wouldn’t be able to function together. So it’s possible that such traits are genetically hardwired.No matter where you go in the world, you’ll find people helping each other, and I don’t think there are any cultures where people just fight all the time. Of course, it’s common to see rivalries between one’s own group and other groups. But if there were a people who fought constantly within their own group, that culture would collapse, wouldn’t it?
Ishida: That’s true. It’s really deep, isn’t it?
Babies are full of mysteries—they might be born already loving justice. From this research and interview,
● A baby’s head is incredibly heavy—much heavier than adults imagine. I want to keep that in mind and ensure their safety every day.
● Humans are born much earlier than other animals. We cultivate our “humanity” in the outside world while training our various senses.
● Rather than just taking care of them, I want to view the baby years as a crucial period for nurturing “humanity.”
That was a lesson I learned.
Looking back on my own child’s infancy, I wonder if things like talking to them from a very young age (even though they didn’t react) or making a snowman right in front of them while freezing cold and letting them touch it (even though they seemed to dislike it) actually had meaning in fostering their “humanity”?
I thought to myself, surely the most important thing is for the baby to feel that the people around them are getting along and having fun, that they are loved, and that “this world seems like a pretty good place after all.”
Ishida: By the way, Professor, there’s one more thing I’d like to show you here.
Kutsukake: It’s the cup and milk I mentioned earlier when we discussed the idea of “what if an adult became a 2-year-old’s palm?”
Teacher: Oh, you made it! Wait, is it this big? (laughs)
(Continued in the next installment: “I Became a 2-Year-Old and Tried Pouring Milk”)
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