Aww, thanks Marienee, TroubleAgain, and Dangermom. 
Phlosphr, I’m sure you wouldn’t go to work or for an outing with unbrushed hair, an unwashed face, unbrushed teeth, and dirty clothes. You wouldn’t run around Target with chocolate smeared all over your face. It’s the same with kids. Children can be mean little fuckers and they sure notice if their classmate is wearing smelly clothes and hasn’t combed her hair all week. Since the little critters don’t emerge from the womb knowing about hygiene and grooming, their parents have a responsibility to teach them.
Obviously, there are levels of appropriateness. I wouldn’t wear Armani to the grocery store. But I also wouldn’t go to the grocery store after a morning of sweaty, dirty work in the garden without showering and putting on a clean t-shirt first. Seems like the same thing is reasonable to apply to children.
We have only the most basic standards. In the OP scenario I’d want to wipe the kids face to avoid, say, getting the food on random surroundings. I think I’d have omitted the “slob” statement though.
I am, however, a documented witch. In that I do insist that my daughter’s hair be brushed once a day. She’d go all week without doing so. Styled? I couldn’t care less (and I’d be a hypocrite if I did). But basic brushing, and the occasional shower / washing so she doesn’t stink… these all are evidently (per her) abusive. Dweezil feels the same way; he’s 13 and hasn’t discovered, as far as we know, that Showers Are Fun 
. As a result, we have to order both kids to shower every couple of days, and both go to their doom as though we had a working guillotine in the tub!
I’m very mellow on this issue. They should be clean. I can live with the rest. My 6 year old likes to pick out his own clothes. As long as they are weather-appropriate, it’s all good. Sometimes they don’t match, and I tell him. If he wants to wear it anyway, it’s fine with me. My husband’s more concerned about matching than I am. The 3 year old usually choses between two things, so he usually matches.
Both of my kids have messy hair. The older has what I call “Harry Potter” hair–when he brushes it, it messes itself back up within minutes. He likes his hair messy (at the moment, anyway), so this is fine with him. The younger one has curls–messy curls are cute, whether attached to a boy or a girl.
Really, I think there are more things to worry about–but I’d definitely be chasing a kid with chocolate face or hands to clean them. Man, you don’t want that stuff getting on anything else.
Here’s what they looked like this summer. The condition of the hair continues to be the same.
My sister has twins (now almost 7). When they were almost a year old, she took them for professional photographs (in matching “stars and stripes” overalls my mother had bought for them -gag), and couldn’t get them to stop pulling off their shoes and socks. She’d get my nephew’s footwear back on, and look up to find my niece waving a bare foot.
Finally, she gave up, and took the shoes and socks off of both of them for the photo.
My mother was horrified, and does not display those photos of the kids.
Because they had no shoes on. I think she thought it made them look impoverished or something. At any rate, you can find photos in her house of the kids at all ages and stages . . . but not one of those barefoot photos is anywhere to be found.
Some people are just weird.
As for the OP, I don’t have kids, either, but I do find myself obsessively wiping off kids who are in my care temporarily, so my guess is that if I did have a kid, I’d definitely be a chocolate-zapper.
As for saying the kid looked like a slob, I guess I need to know the tone; did the mother seem truly upset, like the kid was 14 years old and she’d just caught him smoking pot, or was it more loving and playful? If it was the latter, I’d say it was no big deal at all.
When we looked sloppy or unkempt as kids, my mom would say, “You look like a Ziz.”
To this day, I’m not sure what that means, but it makes a little more sense than what my dad used to say, which was, “You look like Teedy before Toady died.”
Like I said - some people are weird. 
Aw, cute kids!
My younger one has thick, wavy, fuzzy hair (like mine) and it’s a birdsnest within minutes. Yesterday I tried giving her two little braids that met in back (like Lucy in the Narnia movie, I told her it was princess braids). By the end of the first hour of church, she looked like she’d slept in her hairdo before coming to church. I should know better than to try anything remotely fancy with her!
The older one wanted the braids too, but her hair’s still too short. She has thick, shiny hair that falls out of anything fancy I do to it. It’s beautiful hair though–when you brush it, it just falls into place and goes all shiny. It turns into clumps pretty fast.
OMG Cute!
In a store, chocolate needs to be wiped off, before it gets all over merchandise. I wouldn’t make too much of the “slob” comment. Every family has their own “shorthand”. I often tell my youngest (now 8) she looks “like an orphan”. She knows it’s my playful way of saying her face/hands/clothes are dirty and/or her hair needs to be brushed and pulled back.
It does seem, however, like she manufactures her own untidiness. No matter how neat and clean she looks when she walks out the door in the morning to go to school, by the time she comes home, her hair looks like it hasn’t been combed in at least a week, and her clothes are a mess. Oh, well. That’s what kids do.
As for physical deformities, it would depend on what it was. My MIL used to nag me to get my oldest daughter’s ears “fixed” (they’re kind of big and stuck out from her head). She’d say “The kids will tease her about that!” but my attitude was, hey, it’s ears. If they’re going to tease her about something that minor, then obviously they’re determined to find something to tease her about, and if I get her ears fixed, they’ll find something else. For something more major, like a hairlip or cleft palate, I’d get it fixed, because it can effect development. But I also teach my kids that physical appearance isn’t the whole person.
Agreed
:dubious:
Do people let him get away with this? Does he ask people to change their clothing or hair styles?
I’m a little late at weighing in on this thread, but I have been reading the comments. I don’t have a kid, but I don’t see a big problem with the “look like a slob” comment. My only requirement is that kids be relatively neat and clean in relation to the situation. At the fair? Shorts/jeans and a t-shirt are fine. At a fancy dinner/nice occasion? Heirloom outfits are fine, and more attention to detail is needed; this doesn’t guarantee they’ll remain in the same condition by the end of the night, though.
My daughter has CRAZY hair - blond, curly, flyaway - the kind of hair strangers feel compelled to comment on.
She is 2. She hates barrettes and ponytails. She tolerates headbands but either the headbands are shaped weird or her head is, because they are always slipping off the back of her head.
So she usually looks like a ragamuffin. We don’t care. At least not enough to fight her about it. I figure she has the rest of her life to worry about how she looks - I’m certainly not going to rush that!
We try to keep her nose clean and her face clean, and to take her out in clean clothes that sort of match. That’s the extent of it at this point.
Would I ever say she looks like a slob? Probably not, although I will never say never. Would I ever say she IS a slob? God I hope not.