Most Intelligent: Your Mother or Father?

[EatsBrainsAndLeaves]

So who is most intelligent amongst your parents - your mother or your father?

My mum is be far the more intelligent parent...l can't figure out what she ever saw in my dad tbh! They both left school early with no qualifications, but I think if my mum had have stayed at school she would have done well.

My Mum is more intelligent.

I feel my fingers itching to describe them both to even things up, but I will leave it at that.

My Dad is more technical, physically able (i.e. building, fixing etc) but not a good time-keeper. He's deep, and never says anything that doesn't need to be said.

My Mam is very organised and a great support for her friends and family when in need, but she is very blinkered and single-minded which makes me wonder how she's never had a punch in the face, some of the things she gets away with saying.

Intelligence wise, im not too sure. Mam is good with crosswords, but hates pub quizzes, Dad wouldn't bother even trying a crossword, but can play piano and chess. Bit of both, I think.

My father is more intellectual and a better "thinker" than my mother. My mother has far more emotional intelligence.

My father also advised me to marry a man who was more intelligent than me as men do not like to feel inferior. A very sexist statement but one that bore out in reality.

I x-posted with you.

I just don't think academic qualifications, schooling or employment are measures of intelligence. I think its very sad that many people think that way.

worldgonecrazy - That is sad. Do you want to say what problems it caused? Obviously ignore this if you don't want to.

Eatsbrains my first husband couldn't stand that I was more intelligent and capable than he was so he undermined me with low-level emotional abuse that became physical a couple of times. My current husband is far more intelligent than I am, though intellectually and educationally never achieved his potential because of his background and his dyslexia which remained undiagnosed until his early 20s - but he does not feel intimidated by my intelligence and we have a mutually respectful relationship.

I realise an anecdote of one does not mean my father's advice is 100% correct, but I do think that a lot of men are intimidated by intelligent women. It's as if some men feel women should be less intelligent just because they're female.

You see I'd say the idea that women should marry men more intelligent than them is part of the way that women are kept down. There is then a series of little set ups where women feel 'less' than the man they are with, the man may well earn more therefore it's 'logical' for him to have the financial clout and be the earner when children need caring for. The man can also continue to see that women are indeed 'lesser'.

FWIW I am far more intelligent than my partner, he would totally agree with that, it's not his thing in the way it is mine. I earn more, there is no expectation that I would be default child carer, he would never in a million years pull some status thing in order to get his own way. He is far better than me at other things.

This is all alongside my earlier comments about what is and isn't intelligent being highly gendered. Of course the women may well actually be more intelligent by other measures. But structurally society is set up to value the intelligence associated with men, so if advised to marry someone more 'intelligent' than you, this is the same as saying you should marry someone more structurally advantaged than you. Brilliant way of perpetuating structural inequality.

World xposted. Sorry to hear about your experience with your ex. He sounds like an unpleasant man.

Can I just add that I do earn more than my partner and have full control of all the finances. My father also told me to never be dependent on a man for anything other than love, support and respect.

Alice I disagree with your comments. I don't think that being less intelligent is about being a lesser person in any way, nor would my father think that.

My father and I both know that intelligence is far beyond what may be called "IQ intelligence" and certainly his comments were nothing to do with finding and marrying someone more "structurally advantaged".

I guess this discussion is a very personal thing - we are all coming at it from the viewpoint of our own families, an intensely personal thing to discuss in a public forum. We have the added disadvantage that we do not know each other or each others' parents and without knowing a person, such comments can be mis-read or read with our own personal baggage clouding the intended meaning.

I agree that if women are encouraged to marry more intelligent/successful men and men to marry slightly dumber women then that builds a glass ceiling into the very heart of society - all the female accountants who would naturally stay working post-children if they were married to binmen find it much more rational to be a SAHM if they're married to CEOs.

I don't think it makes anyone a lesser person either world. But sadly I don't get to control what society does and doesn't value.

worldgonecrazy - I remember as a teenager thinking about what sort of man I'd like to be with when I was older and deciding that I'd like someone a little less intelligent than me, because in my experience (of teenage boys) boys automatically assumed they were more intelligent than girls, so if I was in fact more intelligent than him he would have to accept we were at least equals.

No comment on how this has turned out with DH

... and then we have those dreadful comments from Dennis Waterman, which recently made the press. Do you remember that article that was published where he said the reason he had resorted to physical abuse was because his then-wife was too intelligent and it was the only way he felt he could win the argument. Disgraceful and disgusting as an excuse, though I suspect a lot of those who resort to physical violence feel a similar way.

Shiiiiitt one of those threads I'm drawn to but don't want to answer really...

My Mum probably- She went to grammar school during WW2 and clearly her family struggled to send her - she had 1 blazer all the way through etc. She ended up and infant school head, whereas my Dad who was initially an industrial scientist during the war (and so a reserved occupation), had a "portfolio career" and ended up teaching the lowest streams in junior school and being very good at it.

Academic now as Dad has vascular dementia and can remember bugger all, and mum is his carer and not really up to the job physically ....sniffle...

No idea, they both left school at the end of high school so 17/18 respectively.

Dad is good at techy stuff, and mum is really good with slightly 'woo' herbal medicines and all round emotional intelligence. They're both well read, and have good general knowledge.

If I had to guess I'd hazard my dad - based on genetics. Paternal grandfather is the smartest person I've ever met and there are a lot very bright people on that side of the family.

Difficult to say. Mum had a better degree, a 1st (in the same subject as Dad) but Dad has many more interests. Mum does not come across as that clever - people are amazed when they find out she has a good degree in a 'difficult' subject - she has very little common sense.
Career-wise probably about the same level of success.

In terms of emotional intelligence - they are both pretty poor!

My mother came from a fairly prosperous working-class family, but who seemed to place no value on their daughter's education. She left school at 15 an would tell anyone who asked that she really wasn't very bright. However she raised 4 children well on a shoe-string, was incredibly practical and efficient and had plenty of emotional intelligence, ( she was a well respected auxiliary nurse for many years.) I just wish she had put a little more weight on the importance of education for her children, as other than ensuring we were all well-behaved and attending school she took very little interest in our education or careers. Maybe this was as a result of her own disinterested parents.

Dad was from a very dis-advantaged working-class background, hardly attended school and joined the navy at 17. I would say his raw intelligence was greater than mum's. He was faster numerically, could reason and argue better and could turn his hand to most practical and engineering tasks. I think the main difference between them was, mum was very accepting of what she thought of as her 'lot' in life, dad wasn't. He did make us believe that no-one is automatically better than you, just because of the circumstances they are born into. Maybe I consider him more intelligent because he never seemed content and questioned and challenged things more.

I wouldn't dream of answering this question. It's like asking which of your children you love the most. All I'll say is that my parents have minds that work in different ways, so how can anyone possibly tell which one is cleverer than the other.

I don't think one is more intelligent than the other.

Academically they are equally qualified in their respective fields, as both have doctoral qualifications. Mom is a professor in Romance Languages at one of the top ranked US colleges [universities], Dad is a Supervisory Special Agent within the F.B.I.

I'm sure there are some people out there (I don't mean on here, I just mean 'out there' in general!), who would say my dad is more intelligent because the qualifications he has (his postgrad studies are in Forensic Psychology and Applied Behavioral Analysis) are in a scientific field, whereas my mom's are obviously in languages. In fact I knew someone who once said, "studying a language at university does not require the same 'brain power' as it would studying one of the sciences."

(Thankfully I met this person at college [university] and we did not stay in contact).

Away from the academics, they both have their strengths. Dad is amazing at remembering random facts; you can be watching a quiz show with him, and the most random question can come up and he'll be shouting out the answer. When you ask how he knows it, he often shrugs his shoulders and says, 'I don't know, I obviously read it/heard it once, and it just stayed locked in my brain'.

Mom has an incredible vocabulary, I have dubbed her The Walking Thesaurus, as if you're struggling to come up with an alternative word for something, not only can she think of one, they're often less obvious ones. Even now I'm living here in England for the time-being, I'll phone her up and say, "Mom - I need an alternative word for xxxxxxxx'.

So yeah, I wouldn't say either one of them is more intelligent, they're both very intelligent but in different ways and different fields.

Dh's mum seems more intelligent than his dad, both academically and emotionally.

They came from very different backgrounds - his family (at that time) had a big house and sent the kids to private school whereas she grew up in a tiny flat on a tough estate. So it's not really to do with the opportunities they had.

I would say dh and I are pretty equal but with some different strengths as you would expect.

My dad is brilliant but lacks formal reasoning skills. He's an excellent problem solver but also inclined towards all sorts of magical thinking because he has never really learned how to critically evaluate claims. For example, he buys into 'alternative mathematics' because he doesn't really understand the basic principle of an axiom and why this matters in mathematics.

My mum's intelligence is more conventional. She lacks my dad's raw brilliance but is a lot more analytical in her thinking than he is. She's also a lot better educated (mum has a PhD, dad has a BA).

FIL strikes me as more or less average whereas MIL is so desperately under-educated that it's hard for me to even find a point of reference to assess how smart she really is. DH is definitely a lot brighter than either of them.

Both about equal but in different ways (though both were academically very successful).

Same applies to me and DH.

None of us can understand why anyone (male or female) would choose a spouse who was significantly less intelligent than themselves. Wouldn't it be very frustrating?

My parents were pretty well matched in intelligence, but in different fields. Mum hadn't had quite such a good education - 2 years teacher training versus 3 years Oxford, but that was probably pretty usual at that time for a woman (war years).

DHs parents, I suspect that his mother was inherently brighter than his father but she was appallingly under-educated (prewar) - he went to a grammar school, then into the Civil Service and Army which continued his education; she went to a crap private school which as far as we can make out taught English and Scripture.

DH and I met at uni and have virtually identical qualifications

I genuinely think they're equally intelligent in different ways.

My dad is good with his academic smarts; I could rely on him to help me make sense of the periodic table, chemical reactions, or simultaneous equations. I could also rely on his very Tory/BNP friendly views to drive me closer to socialism in my teens, and feminism in my 20's...

My mum was what one may call a lateral thinker. She was good at picking up foreign languages, could complete almost every puzzle in her puzzle books, and understood my literature critiques.