In the movies, women with charming and precocious kids win the men.

In graduate school, I studied media and gender. I read one essay about women living during the Renaissance.

Joan Kelly’s 1977 essay Did Women Have a Renaissance looks at women’s role in society between the 1350s and 1530s. She argues that during this time, women’s roles generally shifted to those with less independence. Art and literature depicted women as married and doing domestic things.

She writes of the romance tales told during the time, “Although the ladies of the romances are almost all married, they seldom appear with children, let alone appear to have their lives and loves complicated by them” (p. 29).

So apparently little has changed in how many hundreds of years? Women have kids but the little ones are perfect and ideal?

A lot of movies feature women with children who meet the man “of their dreams.” The women have only one child, not four or five. And he or she is usually super smart and of course cute and charming. The woman meets the man and after the usual contrivances of a movie plot structure (e.g. couple meets, couple is happy, couple experiences drama) the child is a deciding factor in the woman and man living happily ever after.

Think about films such as “Jerry Maguire” or “As Good as It Gets.” Cute kids win over the reluctant male. If the child is sick like the acutely asthmatic boy in “As Good as It Gets,” then all the more emotional and special for the couple to hook up.

The plot of Les Miserables has a similar idea. The book and musical is now a movie starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, and Amanda Seyfried. Granted, Jackman’s character and Hathaway’s character don’t hook up, but the plight of Fantine is even more tragic because she’s mother to Cosette.

1886 painting called “Fantine” and created by artist Margaret Bernadine Hall

What is more heart-wrenching in a movie than a waif-like dying woman with a little girl filled with such promise and loveliness?

This plot line also exists on the flip side. The charming child wins you a woman. In “Love Actually,” the widowed father Liam Neeson meets the woman of his dreams at his step-son’s school.

One man tested this plot in real life with me.

When I was in my mid 20s, one of my coworkers called from the gate of my apartment complex to pay an unexpected visit. Even more unexpected was that he brought along his god-child.

I already had my suspicions about John’s motivation. Coworkers validated them, telling me John showed up at my place to woo me with a child. Because, for John, all women love children and will be so overcome by motherly instinct that they will immediately leap into the arms of a man who demonstrates his care and concern for kids.

Alas, John, I exist only in the mind of a Hollywood script writer.