Adults who want children favor older-looking partners (but not for their money), study suggests

Participants in a study who self-reported a stronger desire to have children showed a weaker preference for younger faces compared to those with a weaker desire to have children, according to a study published December 3, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jingheng Li and colleagues from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K. The preference was unrelated to the potential partners’ perceived wealth or parental prowess.

Researchers have long excavated the foundations of attractiveness — the intangible “it” factor that tempts voters, procures job offers and allures romantic partners. Men tend to associate attractiveness with youthful features, presumably for reasons related to reproduction.

Li and colleagues put this theory to the text. They asked 149 men and 151 women (aged 30 and 31 on average, respectively) to rate 50 headshots of the opposite sex on a scale of “not at all attractive” to “very attractive.” All participants were heterosexual U.K. residents without children who spoke English as their first language. Headshot subjects ranged from 19-55 years old. Then, all participants completed the Desire to Have Children Questionnaire.

In general, participants rated younger adult faces as more attractive than older adult faces, and men and older participants rated faces as more attractive than women and younger participants. Based on two subsequent studies with new participant groups, the researchers observed that the older-looking headshots were not perceived as wealthier or more capable parents than their younger counterparts.

The authors note that studies 2 and 3 were follow-up studies conducted with different participant samples than Study 1. Therefore, the findings from these subsequent studies may not directly reflect the perceptual judgments of the original participants from Study 1.

So, how can we explain the participants’ age sensibilities? The researchers hope to learn more by exploring additional factors, like whether participants already had children, how they accessed and used contraceptives and other cultural and social differences

The authors add: “Our study challenges a widely held assumption in evolutionary psychology. We found that men and women who reported a stronger desire to have children actually showed weaker preferences for younger adult faces, offering no support for the idea that reproductive motivation drives stronger attraction to youth.”

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4pox7N9

Citation: Li J, Lee P, Jones BC, Shiramizu VKM (2025) Participants reporting greater desire to have children demonstrate weaker preferences for younger adult faces. PLoS One 20(12): e0336292. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0336292

Author countries: U.K.

Funding: This research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council (https://www.ukri.org/councils/esrc/) grant ES/X000249/1 awarded to BCJ and a University of Strathclyde Global Research Award awarded to JL. There was no additional external funding received for this study.