Most teenage girls and young adult women I know in real life are as tall or taller than their mothers. Why is this situation reversed in most films and television programs?
Just a WAG: Usually the mothers are the stars and you can’t have lowly co-stars taller than the headliner, can you?
It’s because they use 20-something actresses as teenagers. Them being shorter than “mom” makes them seem younger compared to the actess who plays the mother.
FWIW, my 19 yr old daughter is 5’5, I am 5’10 and my 17 year old is 5’11. Not that this means anything, or relates to the question at hand…
nevermind
threeorange writes:
> Why is this situation reversed in most films and television
> programs?
Cite? Give us a list of TV programs and films where this is true. I can’t believe that you actually did any serious research on this. You’re assuming that it’s true because you know of a few cases where it’s true, and you’ve ignored the cases where it’s not true.
Watch out, threeorange!
Wagner’s tall t.v. teenaged daughter is comin’ to kick your ass!
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If I had a daughter at all, it’d be a pretty good bet that she’d be taller than me, since I’m 4’11".
In continuing with Lyllyan’s anecdotal evidence, I am 5’3", my mother is 5’9", and my 14-year-old sister is 5’9" as well.
I’d never ever cast someone to be taller than their mother, unless the mother was elderly. The height difference provides a bit of visual shorthand to the audience, so they don’t get confused about people’s roles and stuff.
Another anecdotal “I’m shorter than my mother” post.
I’m shorter than my mother - 4’11 / 5’ to her 5’4.
You are correct in that my OP is rife with logical fallacies, but as this is Cafe Society and not Great Debates, I thought it OK to state a casual observation in the form of a declarative statement; I did not, in fact, do any serious research.
I asked this question for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to know if anyone else had made the same casual observations that I had, that in real life teenage girls and young adult women were taller that their mothers more often than not, and that, more often than not, the opposite was true on the screen. So far, there have been no posts challenging or confirming these assumptions (and yes I’m aware that I could be guilty of a form of the Fallacy of Exclusion, where one counts the “hits” and ignores the “misses”).
In my assertion that:
I had implicitly concluded that this was true of the general population; I have no reason to assume that the people I know are part of a statistically anomolous group of freaks 
(although perhaps I should have said “The majority of” rather than “Most”). If my assumption is incorrect, I would welcome evidence to the contrary.
My assertion that:
was, as Wendell pointed out, based on a relatively small number of examples I could think of off the top of my head (I’ll list them at the end of this post).
The second reason I asked this question was that I already had an idea as to why taller actresses were cast as mothers and shorter actresses as daughters (if in fact, this is true), and I wanted to know if others had the same idea. The post from even sven came closest to what I had suspected, that people associate greater height with greater authority, so mothers must necessarily be taller than the daughters to provide the “visual shorthand”, as sven put it, about who’s in charge.
Lillyan, AwSnappity, ruadh, and AvariceAngel, thank you for your responses:), but your statements are not completely relevant, as I had not asserted that all daughters inevitably grow up to be taller than their mothers; I just said most.
Finally a short list of shows/movies with taller mothers and shorter daughters:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Kristine Sutherland is taller than both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Michelle Trachtenberg
8 Simple Rules: Katey Segal is taller than either of the actresses who play the daughters
Gilmour Girls: Lauren Graham is taller than Alexis Bledel
Heartbreakers: Sigourney Weaver is taller than Jennifer Love Hewitt
Freaky Friday: Jamie Lee Curtis is taller than Lindsay Lohan