| EvilTree |
http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderp...29-cf1b21626e1c
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Jodie Sinnema, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, April 01, 2006
EDMONTON -- The next time you see a kid wandering lost and alone in the grocery store, sneak a peak at the parents.
There's a good chance they're ugly, suggests new research from the University of Alberta.
"Unattractive parents are less likely to supervise their children closely than attractive parents," said Andrew Harrell, the same researcher who started a media storm last year when he presented evidence that showed that parents neglect unattractive children more than attractive ones.
He argued that evolution was at play: since pretty children have the best genes, parents will pay them the most attention to ensure their strong genetic material carries on.
His latest research also suggested that attractive parents who don't wear wedding rings are the most inattentive of all -- likely because they are distracted by thoughts of dating.
Harrell's team observed parents and children in grocery stores. He admitted his limited data can't prove his theories, since his team never interviewed the parents or the children.
"The unattractive parents may be ugly because they have had economic difficulties, health problems, diabetes, poor eyesight, psychological and physical hardships that distract them," Harrell offered as an explanation.
Harrell, the director of the population research lab in the University of Alberta's sociology department, began studying parents in grocery stores to figure out if their behaviour contributed to accidents involving shopping carts where children were hurt.
Harrell's team went to 14 grocery stores in Edmonton to observe 861 single parents with one child between the age of one and seven in tow. While ideas on beauty are subjective, scores on the parents' looks were very similar among observers who were part of his study, Harrell said.
They found 16 per cent of homely parents lost sight of their children at least once compared to 10 per cent of the attractive parents. If the homely parents had ugly children, the neglect was even worse, with 36 per cent of parents letting their children out of sight.
Parents were considered neglectful if the child wandered more than three metres away -- too far to intervene on time if a child got into trouble -- or went out of sight around an aisle or far across the store.
A biological sciences professor at Stanford University in California called Harrell's study nonsense.
"There's no possible way he could draw that conclusion from watching people in grocery stores," Paul Ehrlich said. "These kinds of claims are made all the time."
-- With files from Trish Audette Edmonton Journal
© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2006
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I must say, this is amusing bull. |
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