Seeing Children Through the Eyes of the Past: Maternal Youth Bias in Judging the Daughter’s Facial Age

Parents are often said to see their grown-up children as kids—but does this reflect a genuine perceptual bias? This study tested whether mothers perceive their adult daughters’ faces as younger than their chronological age and compared these judgments with the daughters’ self-perceptions. Each mother–daughter pair viewed systematically aged or rejuvenated images of the daughter’s face. In a facial-age judgment task, participants indicated whether each image appeared younger or older than the target’s actual appearance. In a morph-identity rating task, they rated how much each image resembled the target’s real face. Both groups exhibited a youth bias, but it was significantly larger among mothers. Moreover, mothers judged younger morphs as more representative of their daughters’ identity, consistent with enduring parental representations anchored in memories of earlier developmental stages. These results suggest that facial age perception can be shaped by the observer’s relational history and motivational dynamics—parents may, quite literally, see their children through the lens of the past.