Shocking, I know, but I'd like to say it's not the same reasons that most people hate on kids. My main issue in life is that young children are more like our domesticated animal companions than they are like baseline human. Far more prone to impulsive or instinctual behaviors that are reasonably good at detecting unfamiliar or uncanny situations or people.
Today's review is because of my sister's now 1.5 year old kid. She's energetic, social, has excellent eye contact and follows gazes well enough. Plenty of socializing queues, verbalizes, even has a grasp on the abstract logic of interfacing with iPhones and TV Remotes (IDK how frequent this is in kids under 3, but in her case it seems atypical). The kid's not exactly a genius in the way most kids aren't, but she's hitting a lot of the developmental milestones I learned in Developmental Psychology coursework roughly on-time. She doesn't like how I look, and after discussion tonight I postulated that it was probably my long hair and soft face. That seemed to go somewhere with the folks, an unspoken "of course".
The problem we're having is I'm not an expressive/emotive person, and I don't try to be. This along with my intersex related abnormalities makes me increasingly hard to clock. Flat affect is just life for me, and with how disheveled I am on average thanks to uncontrolled narcolepsy, it's a conscious choice of mine to not be present when she's over. Really I hate my mother and father atop that thanks to issues both acute and chronic, so it's not like I can fake well either. I'm not very safe walking around the house in general let alone with an unpredictable obstruction below my sightline and shorter than my cane. It's hard enough to avoid falls with the goddamn dog that sits in front of my room and farts all day.
At any rate, the kid and I don't get along. This is probably two parts my hard to read emotional state, the aura of dread that permeates around me, and the fact that I'm at best ambiguously sexed if you look at my face with the kind of eyesight a young kid will have. Your vision doesn't really clear up until around ages 2-3, sometimes taking longer (resulting in misdiagnosis of nearsightedness), so the kid is working with an incomplete visual fidelity and my ambiguous features. A trans friend of mine once said "no one on earth is transphobic like a baby", and based on how good the kid's eye contact is with me, I don't think this is a simple issue of over-interpreting.
My sister and her husband plus both of my parents are now starting to catch up to the ball here on how unsettled the kid gets around me. Now mind you, I'm not in her life very much, appearing infrequently and rarely for long. Unlike what you'd expect, she is great with strangers both in the home and while out, which helps rule-out the stranger danger response. Instead, she tracks my face and you can see in her face how upsetting that is. She gets confused, a quizzical fear of the unknown and inability to process how my visage contrasts the animalistic baseline of the established sex categories that reproductively compatible males and females have in her normative framework.
It is this context that makes me reflect upon a lot of the inherent mechanisms and emotional and intellectual immaturity that is characteristic of the larger species. I can't meaningfully communicate non-threatening intention, even attempting to reflect or match my mother's exaggerated tone and expressions is just outside of my range. I'm good with kids once they're old enough to grasp social nuances like ambiguously gendered persons... they might still operate on the script of the gender binary, but by about age 8-10 kids are much more capable of the mental flexibility required to contemplate or consider diverse lifestyles.
Some people have this misconception that kids are "innocent", as in, possess no agency moralistically speaking. This model over-fits to include many categories of heuristic judgement, and ironically the prescribed innocence causes people to misattribute a lot of early childhood behavior to abnormality. There is nothing abnormal about the judgemental gaze of a child, it is the immediate assumption they arrive to in response to sensory information that doesn't match the modeling they are attempting to construct. The older a kid is, the more control and mechanisms they have developed to manage their responses to ambiguous scenarios and information. That said, the baseline human brain evident in most kids is not a very fucking ethical, moralistic, or even pro-social one.
Kids are cruel and judgemental by the necessity of their evolved neurology, it takes a very careful rearing approach to reign that in especially if you are sending them off to school. That many adult humans allegedly fully matured are directly comparable to the judgemental animals dripping in motherly viscera in this aspect is more of a significant finding on adults than it is descriptive of children.