"What problems would you expect it to cause?"

"Rusty on my perinatology but I'd translate the name of the condition as 'failure to thrive' - and vaguely remember something about if babies don't get evidence that when they cry they'll get attention and help it makes them sociopaths."

"I imagine some people will want to try anything that reportedly improves children."

"I'm a little worried that some amount of sociopathy is culturally functional but babies take a long time relative to the march of faery social progress so maybe it will never be an issue."

"How might that work -"

"This is me speculating wildly and with approximately no confidence, but, oh, suppose it's important that faery babies are a bit neglected because if they aren't they will form the expectation that in general others will help them when they need help without that being complicated to navigate particularly, only as soon as the debt system considers them people this expectation is suddenly invalidated, and they ultimately find the disappointing transition at age, like, what, two?, to be more traumatizing than the initial neglect."

"Huh. I think people usually don't withhold any help from their new children, it's expected that you just don't bring them around people you don't want them building debt with because young people can be unexpectedly needy."

"Could be that sensing debt alone is doing some of what I imagine. Or I could be on the wrong track."

"That could be. Is there reason to think there's - continuity of identity and expectations across not being a person to being a person, most people figure there isn't."

"Humans don't remember infancy as adults, usually, but often don't remember a considerable amount of their early verbal life either. There was an unethical experiment done once on a pre-verbal-age baby where they showed him a... white furry thing of some kind, I forget what the first white furry thing was, and made a loud noise each time he saw it, until the white furry thing alone made him afraid, and later on I think they lost track of him so I don't know how long he continued to fear white furry things but they did verify before losing track of him that it generalized to other white furry things, so learning took place?"

"Huh!"

"And I think babies can recognize faces and voices pretty early too."

"Babies do prefer the people they know to strangers."

"There you go. How much time does it take the babies to speed up?"

"About two months, sidereal."

"So... longer than that subjectively for the babies during which time they don't hear anybody talking, or see anybody..."

"Yeah. But if they were still inside someone's body they wouldn't have those things either."

"Not true! Necessarily, with as ever the caveat that all I've studied is humans. It's possible to hear in there once the ears are present. It is admittedly dark. And even congenitally deaf babies are in physical contact with another person."

“Huh. - the person I know of who got nine months was my father. If you told me the experience adds fifteen IQ points I’d believe you but anything interpersonal not so much.”

"I mean, this sort of thing is exactly why you need large sample sizes. - I'm sorry about your grandma, sorry, took me a second to catch up with all the - implications -"

“Don’t apologize- anyone can think of the thing about my grandmother but most people wouldn’t think of the thing about the sample sizes, and it’s objectively more important.”

"I didn't invent the concept of the sample size, everybody is giving me way too much credit for everything."

“It is entirely possible everyone from your world would have figured out how to transform mine, but I don’t think that matters to me. I’m not - assigning credit for it. I just want it.”

"Well, that I can do. I am here and due to the fear of annihilating the universe if I go mess with the human timeline I have no other demands on my schedule than making faeryland as good as I can get it for the next million years."

He looks rather adoring.