Parents See Their Youngest Children as Smaller Than They Actually Are

We all know that birth order has some kind of affect on how our personalities are perceived by our family members, but according to findings recently published in Current Biology, it also affects how our bodies are perceived. Specifically, it makes everyone mistakenly think that the youngest in each family appears smaller than they really are.

A group of researchers from Swinburne University in Melbourne rounded up a bunch of mothers whose kids were in the 2- to -6-year-old age range and asked them to estimate exactly how tall their children were by marking a featureless wall. They then compared these estimates to the actual height of each child. Read more...