I KNOW I'm being unreasonable but ...

I only say it to women I don't like as I know it's passive aggressively annoying.

If you don’t like them, own it. It just seems strange to blame it on sleep deprivation when you have one child who is several years old!

Mine does this for EVERYTHING. When first born my DS was image of my father, not a comment made.

Now he’s changed and is mostly my DH to be fair, and MIL is gleeful. Everything, literally everything, is “he’s a Smith”. “That’s the smith feet”. Oh his father used to do that, his uncle did that. Constantly. Every time.

I ignore her.

She has 3 sons and they are her obsession, dominate all conversation. 2 grandchildren are boys and she particularly applies this to them.

our DC2 we are expecting is a girl. MIL is not thrilled by this, I expect she thinks there’s a chance I may get a look in this time 😂

People always do this. Everyone is convinced that they know who a baby looks like and it's always informed by their personal bias. A friend of mine has a little girl that people are always telling her is the double of her, but baby came from a donor egg so they're not even biologically related.

OK Mums, I'll stop doing it....... 🤣

Oh this is also a very good point.

I agree with the pp who said it probably makes sense that we have evolved to see our own image (or that of our own blood relatives) in related offspring in order to treat them more favourably.

I also once read a study that suggested that very young kids actually do tend to look more like their father because again from an evolutionary point of view it meant they were more likely to be accepted by their father.

My family seem to be rhe exception but both my kids when younger looked like the spitting image of in laws and dh. Now thst they are older some of their features are looking more like me.

I am from an almost entirely female family (I'm on mom's side for all the children I'm close to), so I don't relate to this, but is this not just the family on dad's side affirming to themselves that the child they're putting resources into does actually belong to their family member? It's probably a primal thing vs trying to erase the mom.

It does sound very annoying though. I'm pregnant with my first so I have all this to look forward to :)

I knew my son as a baby and as a child (obviously) so it's unsurprising that I am more likely to recognise the bits of my granddaughter that resemble him, than the parts that resemble her mother. I'm sure there are many resemblances to her mother as a child but I didn't know her mum until she was an adult....

Lol, my husband's aunt used to loudly declare that my son was "100% her nephew with none of me in there"! 🤣 I had to point out that biologically , that just wasn't possible 🤣🤣

When I was growing up much was always made about how I looked absolutely nothing like anybody on either side of the family, and maybe I’d been switched at birth. That didn’t feel great!

It was only my very sweet grandfather who could see this upset me, and said I looked just like his sister Winnie (who’d died in childhood sometime in the 1920s, and there were conveniently no photos of her).

It was only when I sprouted the enormous nose characteristic of my dad’s side of the family that there was no denying I belonged 👃🏻

My MIL does the opposite.

DS2 is such a clone of DH its uncanny. Strangers say this when they see them together. DS2s classmates all did a double take when DH came to collect him from school.

When we said it to MIL she looked really confused and said "do you think? I can't see the resemblance ".

I sympathise, I get this too (not just from in laws) and it's so annoying! And I can hand on heart say my DS looks nothing like my husband! He has mannerisms and other quirks that are the same but they couldn't be more physically different! In fact, my son looks more like me as a child (if you compare all our baby pics) but nobody can see past my husband.

I think it's simply because he's a boy and people see what they want to. Case in point, have a friend with a son conceived via sperm donor and I've heard several people comment on how he looks like my friend's hubby (which is categorically impossible!).

No advice, just sympathy. It gets less annoying as time goes on and you're less sleep deprived ha! I missed how old your son is, mine is now a preschooler.

My former mother in law used to do this. I just used to say “do you think so?” My son is the male version of me

My ILs used to attribute all good looks and desirable attributes to dh and all the naughtiness to me and my family, “oh she’s stubborn like her mum”. Made me feel shit.

(and still does) pull out all the old photos and comment on personality traits, and even if they had "the (her family) health constitution '. MIL used to do similar.

I guess it's just a normal thing to do. I just had to find it amusing, and say, if asked who I think they look like: 'themselves'.

My mum kept saying how my daughter looked like her. It drove me mad because they absolutely look nothing alike. As a baby, she looked very like me (and I'm my dad's double) but as she's getting older she's looking more like her dad.

It gave me such internal rage when my mum said it though. Maybe more because she's an awful excuse of a human 😂

Well him and their family will be their frame of reference.

I assume your parents probably think they look like you and your family.

I cannot imagine giving it much more thought than that.

Don't all grandparents and relatives do this though? People have had adopted kids and family have still said the same. I take it as more of a fond way of looking at the kids and remembering their dc when they were young

Oh, I get this too. I fell out with mother in law over it at one point because I got so fed up of every single attribute my kids have comes from husbands side of the family.
Good at maths, must get that from husbands uncle jim.
Excellent artist, that’s come from mil’s great auntie rose.
Wants a career in RAF, husbands distant cousin bob also in RAF..must be in the genes.
Ad infinitum.

My genes clearly played no part..🙄

Mine said the baby looked so much like me and not at all like DH so she didn't believe he was the father. (The children all look like a mix of us both, but she will not hear it) 🤨 I suppose at least your MIL doesn't think you are cheating on her son!

Mine went on and on about dd1 looking like her dad and how clever she is - gets it from her dad (my grades were higher at school but sure, whatever). I mention to my dad about how much it grated but I couldn’t say anything without sounding nuts. That night he posted a photo of me the same age as dd1 (about 2.5) and commented how dd is exactly like I was. It was passive aggressive but subtle and I loved him for it because mil couldn’t ignore it (she’s always on fb). It did actually shut her up.

One worse might be dh’s grandmother who went on about the fact our 3dds are just sooo beautiful but ended it with “I just don’t understand how they’re this pretty”… 😳 dh and I found it funny because she was so unaware how rude she was being.

I bet it’s just a case that it takes them back to when your DH was their baby/little boy. They’ll remember that and have fond memories of it. And it’s not necessarily that you’re being erased - just that they won’t have the same memories of you at the same age. I always wondered why people coo over random babies and could never understand the psychology of it - but as a mother of teenagers, I’m aware that I do that now. Why? Because it takes me back to the days when my kids were babies and it’s a nice memory in that moment. All that said, I can completely understand why you find it irritating, though - just trying to suggest a bit of mitigating context behind it!