An addendum to Monday's entry. Maybe it's not so much the "duh" category as the "ugh" category. It's not that the parents are ignorant, it's that they don't care about the children because, well, the children are unattractive. This just in:
A headline yesterday in Science Times was jolting: "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift." As Nicholas Bakalar wrote: "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 observed that at the supermarket, less adorable tykes were more often allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities - like standing up in the shopping cart or wandering off. Good-looking children, especially boys, got more attention from their parents and were kept closer at hand.
"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," the article said. "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." With fathers, it was even worse, "with none of the least attractive children secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were."
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