Where did the baby go?

Everyone gets very excited with a baby. The baby creates happiness. We look at it. It is "precious". It doesn't do anything. It just sleeps and poops and eats. It just does the basics necessary to live. That's all. We expect nothing from the baby. We love the baby. We love it just because it is. It's like that as it grows. Babies turn into todlers. Todlers turn into children. Children turn into teenagers. Teenagers turn into adults. Somewhere in that sequence, we change. We no longer look at that "baby" the same way. We may love the person they've become but that love is different. That love comes with expectations and restrictions. We rarely just look at an adult and get happy and see that he or she is precious. So the "baby" inside a person has disappeared. At least our ability to see it has disappeared. So what was that?
What is it that makes a baby so precious. Is it only the potential to do something? Most of us wouldn't want to admit that. We would say that it is the beauty of life. But adults aren't dead. They are alive. If babies are precious because they are a human life, then we shouldn't change our feelings for them as they grow. I'm not sure I understand why babies are so precious. I think we like helplessness and dependency. I think we like something that is completely incapable of producing a "threat". It can't hurt us. But people can only hurt us when we won't accept how they are (excluding the rare cases of true violence). It's a failure of love, of compassion. We refuse to accept the imperfections that people develop over time. That's because their imperfections affect us in ways that we don't want to be affected. We want to have control over life. So when someone else is involved, we lose something we want. That hurts us. Teenagers want to control the world because they know that they know everything that there is to know. That is their nature. This attitude robs us of our ability to maintain control over our own lives. So we are upset with them. That is because we lack compassion for their total lack of humility. But humility comes with the realization that we lack control over our own lives. Hopefully, as we grow we gain some compassion for others. But it isn't enough to see everyone as a baby. The truth, is that everyone is a baby.