Are All Children Equally valuable? Parental Investment Suggests the Answer Is No.
Research shows that parental behavior assigns greater value to attractive children. Apparently the care and protection provided to beautiful kids far outweighs that given to sub-par offspring. Doubtless these findings will be vociferously denied by any parents asked because they highlight a very non-PC trait we all possess: prejudice against inferior genomes. We all (some secretly) value beauty highly, yet are told that we’re all the same precious unique snowflakes, equally good despite our sometimes monumental divergences from the norm. While we all ought to be treated as equals in the eyes of the law, nature suffers no such illusions in the dog-eat-dog world of genetic competition.
Given that normative appearance equals beauty, as demonstrated by rankings of computerized composite faces, it’s obvious that a child’s beauty is a proxy for their potential reproductive capital. In the harsh light of day, a child’s inherent biological value to the parents lies in their ability to perpetuate the parental genes. An attractive child equals a genetic jackpot to the parents, hopefully one sufficient to offset the resources spent in raising them to adulthood. This is even more true for female offspring than males, but applies to both. This is a harsh reality few have the stones to admit, but it is a biological fact no different than our valuing a beautiful partner more highly than a harpy. Despite our conscious democratic desire to be proponents of equality, our actions reveal our true nature.
Here is the article based on the study:
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.
Do you think parents take better care of cute children than 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.”
Notice the tenuous language used in the conclusion. Even the researchers are uncomfortable with the findings. Like many aspects of nature the facts highlight the calculating cost-benefit decisions we’ve evolved to act upon, which tend to act in direct contravention to the socialist fuzzy feel-good PC principles we are indoctrinated with by society. It is an uncomfortable truth that certain people are more worth investing our resources in than others, but it is truth nonetheless.
Given that attractive people tend to be higher class/smarter compared to ugly people, couldn’t the neglect of ugly kids simply be a case of their dumb parents acting stupidly?
As per the article the researcher claims this cuts across social strata. Plus I’m not convinced that it’s a given that higher class means smarter or more beautiful. Many beautiful women marry into money given hypergamy, but there are plenty of attractive women born in the lower and middle classes, and plenty of intelligent people too. The classic American success story is one of rags to riches, and those who bootstrap themselves up are typically of at least decent intelligence if not above average.
I can’t find the paper on the internet. I don’t think it was published in the 4 years since the article. I would really like to know the extent this is true across “social class, income and education”.
Middle class and working class child rearing practices are vastly different as described in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Childhoods-Class-Race-Family/dp/0520239504
I am an upper middle class parent and the focus on kid safety is insane. I routinely catch shit from other parents for doing things like letting my kids walk to the store.
Which isn’t to say that parents don’t favor attractive children. Because, anecdotally, that definitely happens. You really would like a study of how differently attractive kids are treated within a family to show it though.
Yeah it wasn’t real clear whether this applied to children within the family, I doubt it, at least not as a controlled variable. As for the class issue, I know what you mean. I am reading Gladwell’s “Outliers” which discusses the dichotomy. Upper class kids get what he terms “concerned cultivation” aka helicopter parenting.
The “concerned cultivation” phrase and discussion in Gladwell’s “Outliers” is cribbed from the “Unequal Childhoods” book. The “Unequal Childhoods” book is worth reading if you are interested in the topic because of its vivid examples.
Then I’ll have to do that because I’ve always thought overscheduling and micromanaging your kids fosters a lack of creativity and independence, but his take is it fails to teach the skills to successfully negotiate with authorities in the world. Both may be true, but I know if I had been raised with the oppressive hovering that many middle class urban kids get I would have been miserable. I highly valued my free, creative time.
The “unequal childhoods” book also makes it out like the working class kids are deprived. I am not so sure. “Concerned cultivation” is really too new for anyone to know what its effects are. It is kind of a SWPL-like fad. My guess, following Judith Harris, is that there isn’t much about the your upbringing that is going to change your genetic predispositions.
“concerned cultivation” does lead to whiny kids; whining is a surprisingly effective tool in negotiation with certain authority figures.
Yes, because disrespect, whining and tantrums don’t elicit the correct response from adults anymore, which is a sound ass-whupping. Such behavior is utterly intolerable in youth or adults. I’ve seen a great many adults too who need a spanking, and not in a good way.
In my opinion, this is total junk science. And I think if there was any time in the world for your Alpha/ Beta male theories,this is ABSOLUTELY it.
It has nothing to do with how good looking kids are. Good looking kids get like beaten and killed every day. You can’t deny that. How many times have you seen like a gorgeous kid and somebody did something just horrible to them? From their own family most of the time.
I think it has more to do with how the father is and who runs the house. The more Alpha the dad is the less he’s going to hover over the kids and he’s not going to let anyone turn his sons into punks. The more the mom runs it, the more rules and things EVERYBODY can’t do, including the dad, lol : ).
Obviously this is a preliminary study, but research across the board shows that beautiful people are perceived as smarter, more honest and generally more valuable. It would make perfect sense that this apply to children as well. I do agree with your assessment of the house where the man wears the pants vs. one where the woman does though. One thing that is well documented is that step-children are more likely to be abused and killed than blood children. This would cut across the lines of appearance because biologically a child that doesn’t share your genes is irrelevant regardless of appearance.
I am asking myself how much merit such a study has for the grim reality of human life. If the observations of the study had any “Darwinian” consequences, humanity would verge towards the attractive, which is clearly not the case.
Case in point: I was such an attractive child, infinitely mollycoddled and overprotected by wealthy parents, with the result that I was unable to realize even a fraction of my potential later in life. That may sound both, megalomaniac and apologetic, but it is neither, just a fact. Another case in point: the sister of a childhood friend, the butt-ugly youngest child of poor but socially ambitious parents. Her elbows and ambitions let her grow into a successful and strikingly goodlooking professional woman. Dentists and hairdressers can work miracles. (I am not being bitchy here!) Maybe good looks are an additional asset for people who are strongly driven by the will to succeed anyway. The operative word is, however, “additional”.
Women do seem to hew towards achievement or dependence along the lines of their appearance. I guess if you have a lot of free Friday nights to study you can go far in life. There are some cases of “ugly ducklings” that grow into more attractive specimens with age, but for the most part you’re talking peripherals. Base attractiveness have to do more with the underlying bone structure and figure than with hairdo. Kids tend to have less control over the clothes they own and the haircuts etc. they get, so they can end up being unflattering, but usually an attractive person is still visible beneath the rags.
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