Having a child shapes an adult’s life in countless ways. The transition from being a childless adult to needing to provide care for a helpless, immature infant undoubtedly reorients the ways in which adults must navigate the world around them. This dissertation explores how the shift to parenthood impacts the information that is relevant for adults to pay attention to and perceive, and how these cognitive biases ultimately facilitate caregiving behaviors. In Chapter 1, I review the ways in which being an altricial species has the capacity to impact the parental umwelt by shaping both caregiving motivations and the proximal sensory environment. Chapters 2-4 provide empirical evidence that infantile cues are sufficient to reorient attention and induce perceptual distortions of threats. These cognitive effects are predicted by physiological arousal and the embodied strategies that both parents and non-parents use to keep infants safe. In Chapter 5, I summarize this work and argue that infants are a salient proximal cue in the environment of a caregiver, whose presence alters adult perception of the physical world. This work has broader implications for how we understand ontogenetic niches across the lifespan, and ways in which our lived experiences have the potential to shape the way we see the world around us.