I have a friend who posted pictures of her DE kid alongside a picture of herself at the same age and in the same pose—they look nothing alike and her kid is a boy. I wasn’t sure what kind of response she was hoping to get? It was confusing.

My friend's adopted daughter from a random orphanage looks 100% like her.

They are very open about the adoption (kid is
24) but no one would have guessed if they did not volunteer this information.

Anonymous wrote:I have found that first children tend to look like their Dad. Life isn’t fair.

Or not.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-paternal-resemblance/

Anonymous wrote:There is something oddly satisfying about seeing a family where everyone looks alike. You can see both parents in all of their kids. It is all very matchy matchy.

Then there is most of life which is almost always more complicated and less superficially appealing.

My siblings and I look nothing like our parents. We all have different coloring, shades of hair, etc. I was also fascinated by the matchy matchy families mostly because they were quite rare in my experience.

Anonymous wrote:I have found that first children tend to look like their Dad. Life isn’t fair.

This makes me laugh because I've always believed it but our first turned out to look like a perfect combo of my dad and DH's mom. Seriously. It's the strangest because he resembles us but just slightly. People are always disarmed to see him.

OP, the others have stated it quite well. Whether you share genes or not, looks are quite random. Our 2nd looks just like my mother and the 3rd looks just like DH. So I have nobody who looks like me. But, I'm not too disappointed. All the great looking people in our family are represented!

There is something oddly satisfying about seeing a family where everyone looks alike. You can see both parents in all of their kids. It is all very matchy matchy.

Then there is most of life which is almost always more complicated and less superficially appealing.

As your kid gets older and starts to pick up your mannerisms people will comment that they "look like you". I'm not biologically related to my mom or brother, hell Im Italian and German and they are English and French, and yet I was always told how much we resembled each other.

I have found that first children tend to look like their Dad. Life isn’t fair.

My biological daughter looks nothing like me. I look nothing like my biological mother. This is only a problem if you make it one.

Well, OP, maybe it will make you feel better to know that plenty of biological kids do not look like their parents either!

I look like a paler, more feminine version of my Asian father, and not at all like my green-eyed, fluffy-haired Caucasian mother. When I was a baby, some people assumed she was the babysitter of a rich Asian family, which made her spitting mad!

She’s not your biological kid. She’s not gonna look like you.

My mother admitted to me after I had my DE baby that she was always sad that I did not look like her (I look more like my father.) The irony is my DE baby DOES look like my mom. So basically even own egg children may not look like their mother.

So that feeling of sadness is not limited to DE moms.

Things may change over time if she adopts your mannerisms she may start to "look" more like you.

It’s not crazy uncommon for a bio child to not look like you but your partner or even their grandparents. I’m a bio child and nobody ever thought I was my mother’s child to the point we decided to take 23rdandme tests when they came out. I look like my grandmother on my father’s side. The tests came back as a parent child match so I know I am.

I have been on this board for a very long time and seen tons and tons of discussions where the OE kid doesn't look like either parent/parent is mistaken for nanny/child is assumed to be adopted/child got the recessive genes. That helped me get to a place where I didn't care about the resemblance. Plus a kid can take after the mom or the dad. We have one OE and one DE. The OE boy looks like me but the DE kid looks like my spouse. Does your kid resemble the other spouse? Also wait til the personality comes out. My OE kid has a number of my bad traits that I'm happy that the DE kid does not seem to have, which I'm happy about. There is a feeling of seeing yourself that I don't have with my DE kid but I think that could have just as easily happened if he had been OE and just favored my spouse. You can't predict.

Obviously I knew my DE baby wouldn't look like me (even though we chose a donor who looks quite similar to me). I have been head over heels in love with my daughter from the time I was pregnant, and I wouldn't change a thing about her even if I could. She's my adorable girl and she's who she's meant to be. But still, at times I am a little sad we don't resemble each other. Just wondering if other DE moms feel the same way.