Who looked after the first baby? Help me answer this question from my 3yo

[becausewhhhhy]

My 3yo has started asking questions.... normally I can answer/Google but this one has me stumped, so I'm turning to mumsnet for help...

'Who looked after the first baby, if there were no parents?'

Evolution..there was no first baby....good luck explaining that to a three year old 😂

It's a cute question though and pretty clever for a toddler.

On an evolutionary level, some sort of life form would have benefited from parental care (likely gross secretions), then evolved into more sophisticated bonds.

An ape never gave birth to a fully different species with different needs. Mums and babies evolved together to complement each other.

😆

Once upon a time the universe created conditions where tiny, tiny little bits of life could exist. Over so many years, you can’t even imagine how many because the number is so big, those little bits of life got bigger and more clever and eventually some of them ended up looking like us. So there wasn’t ever a first baby, just a really, really, really slow change and that’s how all the different animals and birds and insects and fish and plants all happened, just from those same tiny bits of life all those years ago.

This question makes my brain hurt!

I think it's because she's just become a big sister and she knows babies grow up to become adults/parents, so in her mind there must have been a baby first.

Yup! 😆

This is good!

Can you take her to a farm to see how animal mothers look after their young? And then sort of work around the 'we started out as animals' and work up from there?

Just don’t try and explain evolution…my nephew talked me into a corner at a museum so I had to give it a go and then faced a week of him going ‘BUT WHY IS IT STINCT????’ (Extinct)

Awww this is too adorable!

Wait until you get the question "if it was only Adam and Eve that had babies 1st..where did their GC come from?:...

😆

I actually commented to FIL the other day that it would be easier to explain if we believed in the bible 😆

Some babies have to look after themselves - take him to look at frog spawn that turn into frogs.

Julia Donaldson's monkey puzzle can be useful to get the idea across that 'none of my babies look like me' and that creatures can change how they look quite a lot.

I remember my youngest at 4 saying from the back of the car on the school run ‘you know how we have gran, and great gran, and great great gran and great great great great great gran? well how was the first one born??’

It’s such a cute and clever question.

Natural History Museum?

Don’t say that we started out as animals…!

It really wouldn’t be - 3 sons, one murdered, who was there for cain and Seth to have kids with? 😂
(i once had a fundamentalist tell me in all seriousness that Adam and Eve obviously had daughters which the Bible didn’t mention and so…incest…honestly evolution is a doddle to explain to a small child compared to that!

Afraid I'd have to say I don't know...........is there anything wrong with children knowing that their parents don't have all the answers?🤔

He sounds very bright and your brain is going to hurt a lot for quite a few years🤣

Children’s questions are difficult… my ds when 7 asked “ when 2 men get married how to they decide which one is going to have the babies 🙈

I love when they hit the philosophical question stage.

this is an easy one though. Start with cells and move on from there. Tiny changes, so never really a first baby.

You know what I mean! Evolution explained at a three year old's level.

'That's a good question. Do you want some ice cream?'