Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift

Parents would certainly deny it, but Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.

Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.

The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents' attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child's physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.

The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.

Homely children were also more often out of sight of their parents, and they were more often allowed to wander more than 10 feet away.

Age - of parent and child - also played a role. Younger adults were more likely to buckle their children into the seat, and younger children were more often buckled in. Older adults, in contrast, were inclined to let children wander out of sight and more likely to allow them to engage in physically dangerous activities.

Although the researchers were unsure why, good-looking boys were usually kept in closer proximity to the adults taking care of them than were pretty girls. The researchers speculated that girls might be considered more competent and better able to act independently than boys of the same age. The researchers made more than 400 observations of child-parent interactions in 14 supermarkets.

Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, executive director of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and the leader of the research team, sees an evolutionary reason for the findings: pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care.

Not all experts agree. Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, said he was skeptical.

"The question," he said, "is whether ugly people have fewer offspring than handsome people. I doubt it very much. If the number of offspring are the same for these two categories, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids."

Dr. Robert Sternberg, professor of psychology and education at Yale, said he saw problems in Dr. Harrell's method and conclusions, for example, not considering socioeconomic status.

"Wealthier parents can feed, clothe and take care of their children better due to greater resources," Dr. Sternberg said, possibly making them more attractive. "The link to evolutionary theory is speculative."

But Dr. Harrell said the importance of physical attractiveness "cuts across social class, income and education."

"Like lots of animals, we tend to parcel out our resources on the basis of value," he said. "Maybe we can't always articulate that, but in fact we do it. There are a lot of things that make a person more valuable, and physical attractiveness may be one of them."

http://www.nytimes.com/20...nd&emc=rss

my childhood becomes much clearer now.

Sure explains why my brother was treated like the second coming, while I was the shame of the family!

JediMaster said:

You're 34.
You should have overcome that by now

lilgish said:

He appears (to little ‘ol me) to be focusing too much on physical evolution, rather than the psychological evolution of our species.

I mean come on….would God create in man the tendency to judge the book by the cover? How flawed would that be?

Look around, this seems like a natural progression of evolutionary psychology.

(I’m not saying its right…but then, evolutionary theory doesn’t concern itself with right or wrong.)

DuckPurple said:

What kind of psychological evolution are you talking about? And involving any kind of god in this is really not smart. Would God create in man the tendency to rape and murder, because those things happen daily. People rape and murder their own children.

DuckPurple said:

If this were the P & R forum, I'd ask you why you were so sure there was a God. Good thing this isn't the P & R forum.

Hey...no harm intended. (take it easy y'all)

I only thought to support the evolutionary concepts of the article posted.

If I wanted to inflame the readers of this post, I might have suggested any of the following:
1) We dispose of ugly children. After all, it’s for their own good.
2) We create a slave class, based on the level and degree of ugliness.
3) We create a new government service that helps the impoverished to pay for their plastic surgery—to help with their self-esteem issues.

Or….We could try to act more human, and remember this article the next time we are so quick to judge a person. (but that would be ridicules )

Ace said:

Don't do that. You'd then be lynched.

DuckPurple said:

Personally, I can't believe they even did a study on this and thankfully, they didn't log the names of those they found ugly/homely vs pretty/handsome.

DuckPurple said:

Replace "ugly" with "stupid" and "children" with "adults" and I think you got somethin' there.