He looks just like you!

 

Why do people, relatives, friends, and strangers alike, insist on telling me my kids look just like me?  I always felt they took more after their mother.  This happened with both my sons, and it was universal.  It never failed.  Every time I’d introduce my tiny offspring to somebody they’d chime in, “Oh! He looks just like you!”

Now, I’m a cynic, so I always assume they were just reassuring me that my sons are mine.  That my wife honored her vow and was faithful.  I found it condescending.  The thought of the misses stepping out never crossed my mind.  I know that’s now how they’d intend it to come across but that’s how I took it.  I couldn’t help it.  Like I said, I’m a cynic. 

I’m not alone though.  I looked it up and it’s a thing.  Online there are dozens of posts of mothers complaining that people say their bundles of joy look like the father and not them.  Men are told more often than women that their mini-me’s look like them.  And, apparently, it’s true.

A 1982 report by Morton Daly and Margo Wilson in Ethology and Sociobiology says that people are biased to say that a child looks like dad because of an evolutionary advantage.  A father is believed to be more committed and willing to provide more resources to his child.

Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill, in an issue of Nature state, “The variability of babies’ faces is more similar to the variability of fathers’ faces than of mothers’…facial morphology of a baby is more determined by the father than by the mother.”

If the father recognizes that the infant as his own, he is more likely to care for it.

That study has numbers to back up the theory too.  Group members correctly matched about 50% of infants with fathers but struggled to match mothers getting a much lower accuracy rate of around 38%.  However, as the child grew older, he’d take more after his mother.

So, it turns out that my cynicism is backed up by science.  Whether consciously or not, they were trying to reassure me that my little whippersnappers were mine. No, not to make me feel good or proud, but to protect my kids.  But apparently, it’s true.  A child looks more like their father as an infant.  Now that is fascinating.  Nature recognizes men as jerks.  I can’t argue with that, but I can say that I will do my best to care for my kids and protect them.  And that’s from my heart and not some instinctual evolutionary desire to propagate my lineage. 

And no, I'm not going to look up the science of how males of most species selfishly care for their progeny to ensure the survival of their pedigree.  I do it out of love.  Please don't prove me wrong.