Carboxylic acids make teens give off a pungent olfactory mix redolent of cheese, plum and even goats

“This makes a lot of sense because [baby odor] facilitates bonding between parents and children,” says Ilona Croy, a psychologist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and a co-author of the new research. But that doesn’t last forever. Once children become teens and are no longer as reliant on their parents, becoming smellier to mom and dad can help them foster a degree of independence as they begin to strike out on their own.

“It’s good to see the sense of smell getting a bit more attention,” says Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. He cautions, however, that the research might be too preliminary to jump to any firm evolutionary conclusions.