Is this baby-related nicety a universally accepted lie?

I had this conversation with someone just the other day. All babies look exactly alike to me, too.

I recall a discussion in which it was said that it was a way of societally reinforcing that the mother’s partner is actually the father, rather than, say, the milkman.

When I was your age, I remember having a very similar conversation with my husband. Now that I’m a few years older and have two very adorable children of my own, I’ve realized that the “baby feature detection system” came with the whole parenting package. Although instructions for taking care of said baby are not included in that parenting package.

I was just thinking about this the other day during an episode of Dr. Phil (I know, shut up). He had this mid-twentiesish Italian guy on who wanted a nose job and his family was pretty abhorrently opposed to his altering such a strong familial & ethnic feature. The title of the show was something like ‘Fix your Face to Change Your Race.’ Anyway, they showed a video of him as a newborn in the little hospital bassinet and all of his family gathered around commenting on his giant baby schnoz. And it was pretty huge. Probably two and a half times the size of other baby noses.

Yes, it most certainly is a universally accepted lie. I’ve done it a million times and I have worked in the nursery at the hospital many nights and saw thousands of babies. None of them look alike to me though.

There was one newborn baby (mine) who was purely beautiful.
Go see: http://cinemagypsy.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/walking/

got a 1 month old and determined that her facial morphology is +/- 100% similar to all mutt (mixed euro) newborns. that said, she does have a crook’d right ear that runs strong on the maternal side.

I think that the “baby feature detection system” comes with experience. I couldn’t tell anything about my nephew, other than that he looked like Winston Churchill….but my mom and my sister-in-law’s mom were pros. Why? Because they have seen all of us as babies. My nephew looked just like my brother looked—when my brother was a baby.
That being said, I do think most of the “detection” is 90% crap and that pretty much everyone allows the lie to keep going.

Baby noses are all cute and buttony, but their eyes are what give away who’s whose offspring.

While some features are universally similar across babies, there are rare exceptions, mostly concerned with unusually sized or irregular features. Some of these are considered more socially awkward than others.

For example, saying, “He has his great-uncle’s harelip,” is generally less well-received than, “She has her mother’s dimples”. However, almost all family-related correspondences that are truly observable in infants can be made appropriate (as in, “she has her aunt’s (giant, crooked) nose.”)

My youngest sister herself has a giant fingernail-shaped dent in her forehead that had been there since birth. It’s some kind of combination wrinkle/dimple. Now she probably worries about whether or not the trait will be genetically transferable to her children - when she was younger, we had her convince we had poked her in the forehead until it became permanent. I love gullible siblings!

i work in an ob/gyn office and i am stunned (daily) by the age of girls having babies and fertility consults, most of them are 3-6 years younger than me. i’m 30. also, the age of “teenage pregnancies” is dropping rapidly, we now have several 13 & 14 year olds coming in for prenatal care. downright creepy!

Oh my gosh- you are SO right about Thin Red Line. I definitely kept getting those dudes mixed up.

As for babies- I don’t think babies even look like THEMSELVES when they’re just-born. So, unless someone remembers what the mother/grandfather/whoever looked like right after birth, people are either nuts or lying. Or both. Pregnancy and childbirth seem to inspire a whole host of nuttiness.

And um, yeah- been married for 5 years and we don’t want our own children yet. We love other people’s babies and kids (including 9 nieces and nephews!) but…not for us. Not yet (and no set time for when, either).

I don’t know. I know it sounds strange, but I really could see traits in both of my kids that looked like us. I was right at the time of my son’s birth that he had my eyes, but his dad’s nose. And he still does at age 16.

I do have to admit, though, that I predicted after seeing my daughter at birth that she would look more like my husband than me. Wrong. She now has a lot of my features.

Oh, you’re thinking I’m nuts right now. But just wait until you become a mother, if you decide to take that leap. So many things will happen — like recognizing baby features — that you had never even imagined! And you’ll have to come back and write to us and say, “Hey, that lady was right! I AM acting like a crazy mom, too!” haha!

I think it all comes back to parents (mothers in particular) feeling compelled to say nice, cute things as a way to overcome their lingering doubts that parenting was such a great idea after all.
Most of the parents of small children I know are so drag-ass tired from taking care of them, they don’t even have the energy to think or talk about it much. When they do, it’s likely just a regurgitation of what others have said about their kids.
I mean, once you’ve got the kid, your life is pretty much laid out for you if you are the responsible adult. Making cute comments is just a coping mechanism, something you do when you’re in that situation to try and make the best of it.
Debating whether the kid looks like which parent is just a way to make the time pass and a social diversion.
I don’t really notice children that much to scrutinize their familial appearance, outside of the obvious, like when a Latina marries some white guy and the kid has big brown eyes and black hair.

Wow, I’m glad I’m not the only one, because I’ve felt for years that I clearly had something wrong with me. Perhaps this is genetic, and that would explain why we both suffer the malady.