Doesn't it feel terribly unfair sometimes that..

[DrowninginMaryBeardsBeard]

The kids in primary school who tend to be the clever ones also, unfairly, seem to be attractive and popular too.
Not sure if its just my kids school. Obviously my kid is beyond beautiful to me. But she's not as well put together as these girls, her hair is all over the place due to her inheriting curly hair from me, she's too skinny due to food aversion.
Then there's a group of girls who are just beautiful, they always have neat work, speak several languages, get the best parts in the school play, they look... cool... even at nine. Mums are equally stylish usually European women.
Why is this? Attractive well educated women have attractive clever children. Scatty, hairy mares like me born without beauty and brains have to run around like headless chickens, work more hours for less pay so have less time for taking our kids to the hairdressers and spending hours teaching them Spanish, doing long division or reading the classics?
It's like if you see the line of kids you could almost match them up with the parents without knowing. Slightly overweight child with the overweight parents, messy kid with the messy mum (that's me!), hippie child with the hippie parents, sleek ponytailed outdoorsy child with horse riding mum. I mean this isn't exactly rocket science. But the link between attractiveness, academic ability, class and 'polish' .... that I find fascinating.
Is there also a link with neurodiversity?
For what it's worth my primary school was not middle class at all, kids with parents in prison or addicts who had left them with grandparents to raise, and this was not the case. We were all the same class and so that wasn't a factor. It was more who was 'pretty' and that was only decided by who the boys wanted to kiss, so not a true representation of beauty. I remember there being a sort of 'blonde privilege' where blondeness was a marker of beauty which brunette would never beat, regardless of facial symmetry. That would never fly now and would be rightly challenged in DD's very diverse school.
And these ramblings are why I'm exhausted every day...

This is really interesting op.

i was by far the cleverest child in my class every year at primary school and it was actually ranked back then, born 78 so primary school was 82–89.
This shocks me so much now as an adult with 2dc that I was number 1 and some poor sod was number 30 and knew it.

i was also by far the fattest kid in the class but have always been told I’ve got a pretty face 🥺 and I’ve done nothing remarkable with my life at all and have been plagued by physical and mental health problems for years and was diagnosed with ADHD this year at the grand old age of 45.

My dc are 12 and 20 and also attended my primary school too. They are both autistic and very bright but mainly shine in their chosen subject. I was more of an all rounder. They are both good looking kids, my dd especially has natural corkscrew curls and has spent her life having strangers pat her head which has given her a huge complex. Both suffer with anxiety and ocd and are not achieving what they are capable of with ds dropping out of uni and dd currently being off school most of this term due to severe social anxiety.

i would give anything for them to not be struggling and stressed so much and be completely average academically. They are not happy and that breaks my heart.

ive always thought it was so important to be clever and well put together and on reflection it means very little.

i sometimes think of what I could have done career wise but that’s not important to me anymore. Happiness and good mental health is so much more valuable.

That is often the case, but not always. In my DS’s primary class I can think of a couple of really clever girls. One was like this (bit of a bully too) but the other was pretty ordinary looking.
DD also was near the top towards the end of school and def not one of those types - too messy w the hair & quirky!
There was a girl like that in DS’s class though, although I focused more on the boys I suppose - DS could’ve been perceived as handsome and clever but he wasn’t alpha male enough to tick all the boxes!
There’s no way you could put the mums w the kids unless there was a big facial likeness.

I know this isn't the point here but I spent ages learning how to do my girls hair really nicely and can get them looking lovely and neat very quickly now (mixed race girls with very curly hair). It took a lot of YouTube tutorials on Saturday mornings and buying in bobbles and sprays etc but I do believe that now they feel better about their appearance/don't need to fiddle with their hair they can concentrate better at school.

I sort of agree. But - in my daughters class at least - the wheels fell off for all of them in various ways over the years.

Massive mental health problems, violence in the home, huge anxiety, eating disorders, anorexia.

You name it, none of it seemed to discriminate right across the girls in the class.

I work in a team with extremely clever women that I admire, in a historically male dominated Industry. Apart from one who is typically very attractive all the others are just average looking women. But they are brilliant! At school it doesn't show your true potential or intelligent in a lot of areas tbh. Of course some people are born 'lucky', with attractive looks and intelligence. That's just life!

@violetcuriosity that would be ideal but DD has sensory stuff around her hair. In particular she chews it so if I put it up, she would pull it down to chew the ends.

My kid is among a couple of the cleverest kids in a 90 cohort primary year but he's a boy - nobody is scanning for how pretty he is and the bar for tidy-ness is regular hair cuts, an ironed uniform and knock the mud off his shoes each day.

As with just about all things, girls feel the brunt of this acute presentation surveillance and boys fly mercifully under the radar.

Life is unfair but it’s what you make of it that matters.

Good hair has its limits as a life skill. Why doesn’t DD eat?

I don't think that is true at all.

Partly because I was always one of the smartest kids, and certainly neither beautiful nor cool, and the same applied to my smart friends (they look fantastic now though ).

In my son's Y4 class one of the smart kids is also handsome and charismatic, but the others are the usual scruffy looking specimens. Impossible to know what they will all look like in 10 years though. The most beautiful girl is in "tables club".

To me that sounds like your dd’s primary school is in a very affluent area and there is quite a lot of showcasing going on.

I have no idea who the bright kids are in my kids' schools, wouldn't have a scooby. But looking back on my school years, that certainly wasn't the case, I'd say the opposite in fact, especially with boys!

This was not my experience of school (I’m only 30). The ‘pretty and popular’ kids, both boys and girls tended to perform worst across the board in their subjects, be in the lower sets and had poor exam results. They also were less likely to go to university.

Could they just be wealthy? Wealth buys you extra time, extra help, extra polish, better health and less stress.

I suppose there's other things at play. I think it's that some things are massive factors in how our children develop and that's most apparent by the end of primary.

So for example, I was one of the clever kids in my primary but only in one or two subjects. I've never been able to study things I don't find interesting, probably down to ADHD. So I didn't leave school with a great overall education, it was A's in the subjects I enjoyed and C's and D's in the ones I didn't. I did a degree but at the end I didn't apply for any grad level jobs but took on an assistant manager role at a coffee shop as I felt more at home around the people there. This is what growing up WC can do, it can make you feel out of your depth and like you don't belong.
So after ten years of minimum wage jobs, I moved into the public sector. I guess this was already shown as a valid option for people like me my whole family had always worked in the council. Then I started working in family support and the rest is history. I chose a career helping people like the families I grew up around. I see families who struggle with addiction and parental mental health.
So for my daughter, she's up against both barriers of class, ableism as she has autism, sexism and being born to a skint single mother who works out of the house 40 hours a week. She's also got trauma from my abusive relationship with her dad. She can't always shower or bath at his as he lives in a shared house. She doesn't always have clean clothes because he can't remember to bring them or take them to his mums to wash.
You only have to look at all these factors to see how many barriers there are to being attractive, well turned out (I'll keep using that phrase as we all know what it means) and be a good student.
Compare that to a two parent household, with both in the private sector, one working from home or part time to do school runs and life admin, good genetics, being NT... the list goes on! Add being confident because you know your parents are reliable, dependable people, not likely to pick you up drunk or take you to the pub until 8pm on a school night!

Can't say it has been my experience. Through school or work! I am average, in both looks and intelligence. The intelligent ones in school weren't the typically good looking ones from what I'm remembering!

At a basic level most parents instil their genes but also their social mores and styles into their kids.

I’m not particularly attractive but always excelled academically. DH likewise. All three kids are shaping up to be multi-lingual academically confident people who lead with their brains (rather than their social successes, iyswim).

Better breeding stock! It's subliminal bias; looking for healthy, shiny and genetically robust mates, happens, and life-style etc is perpetuated.
Yes, it is this basic (with some exceptions, granted). As with any animal breeding lines, certain parameters will breed certain traits. Tall athletic bods are unlikely to be attracted to the short dumpy bods (such as mine), and then the whole social class will raise its ugly head...

Your ex gets unsupervised access to a daughter he has traumatised and in a shared house? Christ, what court has allowed that?

As others have said, being super bright at school isn't always the gift it seems. Breezing through school can mean you don't learn resilience

I expect the very bright and beautiful ones get noticed. But there are probably brighter but more average looking children there too.

Welcome to the UK family court system. This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. The needs /wishes of the abusive parent are generally put higher than the needs/wishes of the child.

It’s a bit of everything. And intelligence often brings money and understanding of how to be attractive. And confidence. Confiedencr makes you attractive.

Woah that's so rude, I'd be furious!

I'm mixed race and my (single) mum's favourite wtf anecdote is how a woman complimented me as a small child and said "what a beautiful child, her father must be so handsome". (My dad has always looked like an ogre. My mum is beautiful although tbf I don't look much like her, being mixed.)

How do people not realise how rude they're being!!

You just sound like you're stereotyping. Plus you sound lacking in confidence so everyone else seems more together than you. Don't let this rub off on your dd. Confidence will help her in life.

Clever men earn lots of money and marry beautiful women (because that's what men prioritise) and the children get a combo of beauty and brains in the gene pool? Not the most forward looking theory but makes sense to me. Run this over a few generations and both the men and women get both cleverer and more beautiful and there an elite forms.

Also looks vary over region. Dh and I noticed this starkly when we visited one particular city for a concert the general public looked quite different to the general public where we live!