Mommy, Is My Nose Too Big for You to Love Me?

"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much."

Tell that to parents, who according to some new research treat their more attractive children better than they treat their less attractive childlren. Now, in all honesty, the data seems hardly scientific to my untrained eye, but it's still a pretty sad hypothesis. As if people weren't self-conscious enough about the way they look already, let's just add another log to the fire and tell people that if they're not pretty their parents didn't love them as much.

Call me an optimist (and I'm not generally one), but I tend to think this research must be flawed. I do not think that all the talk about love being blind is false. I think love forces you to appreciate someone so much that you don't see them for their physical characteristics. My friends kvetch to me about being fat or whatnot all the time, and I always think it's silly because I just don't think of them that way, I don't see them in that light (and they are NOT fat or whatnot anyway). And maybe I'm being naive again, but I do also believe that parents love their children, love them enough to see past their physical defects.

Basically, I am just not mekabel this article. I refuse to believe that parents take better care of their prettier children. And if for some reason I'm wrong (not that that ever happens, but if it did ;), I think it's a super-sad commentary on our society. I mean, how much more steeped in physicality can we get?