New Study Reveals Parents Do Have A Favorite Child. Here's Who It Is.
When snow began to fall the other day, my children made a beeline outside to scoop it up and stomp around. Within minutes, they were chucking snowballs at one another, most of which disintegrated mid-flight and landed in a flurry on their faces and necks. There was a lot of delighted shrieking, punctuated every few minutes by an aggrieved howl of “No fair!” or “He hit me!”
Both of my kids wanted to throw snow at their sibling. Neither wanted snow to land on their exposed skin. I stood there uselessly saying benign things like, “Gentle!” and “Not the face!”
Finally, my 11-year-old daughter ran up to me to deliver an accusation: “Whenever I hit him, you say ‘Stop,’ but when he hits me, you say nothing!”
I looked over at my 15-year-old son and raised my eyebrows to ask, “Does this sound familiar?”
“You know what he says?” I told my daughter. “That when he hits you, I say ‘Stop,’ but when you hit him, I say nothing.”
“Oh,” my daughter said, quietly assessing this predicament.
Over the years, whether wielding snow or Nerf guns or water balloons, both of my children have regularly accused me of favoring their sibling over them.
The problem with identifying favoritism is these shifting perspectives: the parent’s and each siblings’. None of us are unbiased, and we’re all predisposed to see ourselves as the aggrieved ones whenever confronted with criticism.
With siblings, some degree of comparison is inevitable, and it’s hard not to show your relief when one kid is behaving by piling on the praise for the sibling who is doing their homework or brushing their teeth. I don’t feel like I’m showing favoritism to one kid, but that’s mostly because I’m so overwhelmed by the unique ways they are both trying my patience.
It turns out, parents have surprisingly similar preferences.
While every family has their own particular dynamic, researchers have discovered that, in most families, favoritism actually follows a similar pattern.
Researchers from Brigham Young University and Western University pulled from 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and dissertation/theses, along with 14 databases, for their meta-analysis of “parental differential treatment,” or the ways that parents treat siblings differently. They categorized parents’ actions into categories of “differential affection, differential conflict, differential resources — like how much time you spend with your kids or things that you give to them — as well as differential autonomy or freedom — like how much leeway you give kids,” Alex Jensen, one of the study’s authors, told HuffPost.
A parent might show differential treatment by spending more time with one child, or spending more money on them, for example.
The researchers examined how this differential treatment varied by the children’s birth order and gender, as well as their temperament and personality. While previous research has been mixed when it comes to favoritism and gender, this study found that “daughters tend to be favored, and that was across the board,” Jensen said. Both mothers and fathers tended to show differential treatment for daughters.
Not surprisingly, “agreeable or conscientious children tend to be favored. That’s also across the board,” Jensen said.
When it came to birth order, it was also no surprise to see that parents tended to grant first-born children more freedom and autonomy — these children are, after all, older than their siblings by definition. But this favoritism persisted into adulthood, Jensen said, well past the point when a parent would worry about a child’s ability to, say, go to the store on their own.
It’s possible thatsome patterns, like relying on the competence of an eldest daughter, begin in childhood and continue throughout adulthood. Jensen thinks this could be one explanation for why parents tended to favor girls, noting that they have a reputation of being easier to manage, behavior-wise, than boys.
“Maybe daughters are just a little bit easier to parent,” Jensen said, noting that if girls have fewer behavior problems than boys at school, it makes sense that a similar pattern would emerge at home. This seems more likely to him than another theoretical explanation: that parents treat daughters differently because they presume they will one day become the caregivers of their elderly parents. “From an evolutionary kind of standpoint, I guess that’s possible,” Jensen said, albeit less so than the theory that girls are simply “easier to parent.”
The big question, of course, is why favoritism matters. Of all the things parents are supposed to be tending to, what are the consequences of letting favoritism go unchecked? Does it really matter if, once in a while, I avert my gaze the moment my daughter lobs a snowball at my son’s head?
But like many other relationship dynamics in childhood, favoritism in a family can cast a long shadow.
Children who are favored “tend to have better mental health, do better in school, have better family relationships. They’re less likely to engage in substance use than other teenagers. They get in less trouble at school and home,” Jensen said. Children who are not favored, on the other hand, are more likely to have negative outcomes.
It’s possible, Jensen noted, that when favoritism goes to an extreme, even the favored child will suffer because of it — but it would be tricky to determine when that line is crossed in a particular family, let alone in the general population.
How should parents respond to — or prevent — accusations of favoritism?
While a family might fall into a pattern of favoring daughters, older siblings or children who are more conscientious (who wouldn’t want one of those?), there can also be a huge amount of variation over the years in the way that parents feel about their children.
Dr. Blaise Aguirre, a psychiatrist who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of the forthcoming “I Hate Myself: Overcome Self-Hatred And Realize Why You’re Wrong About You,” told HuffPost, “people, just generally speaking, tend to feel closer to those who are temperamentally similar to who they are.”
For example, if an emotionally intense child has a parent who is less so, “they just don’t understand how a child could be so reactive, and so it can be confusing,” Aguirre said. He added that parents tend to prefer easygoing children, the kind who don’t get calls home from the teacher.
Aguirre also noted that a person’s parenting can change significantly between a first child and subsequent children.
“These relationships are in constant states of flux,” he said.
Infants, Aguirre noted, are sort of hard-wired to charm their parents in a way that protects their own survival. As children grow, however, some parent-pleasing behaviors can lead to comparisons among siblings and accusations of favoritism.
In addition, “we tend to remember rejection far more than we remember praise,” Aguirre said. “If you’re getting equal amounts of praise and rejection, if you could actually measure 50% praise, 50% rejection, when your parents criticize you for your behavior, you’re going to remember that more.”
Unless the praise is for a sibling. “You’ll remember your sibling’s positive praise, much more than you remember their rejection,” Aguirre said.
As a parent, you can’t always control how your child recalls and interprets the things that you say or do. You can, however, listen with an open mind to any concerns your child has, whether they have to do with favoritism or something else.
If a child says you’re playing favorites, Aguirre suggested that a parent say something like, “That’s just not my experience, but clearly, it’s yours. So, tell me: What is it that you see?”
“Getting them to kind of understand their own state of mind and understand the state of mind of the parent,” and having them “name and label what their experience is,” Aguirre said, often has the effect of making a child feel less upset.
Aguirre said that he would advise parents to talk with their children without delay about any feelings that arise.
“Often the perception is in the mind of the child,” he said. “I think that the best thing to do is to sort of deal with it right away, lest it become ingrained in the child who sees themselves as less favorable, as being defective in some way.”
A parent might ask a child to consider another’s perspective, like I did with my daughter, or reassure their child that they love them for what makes them unique, not how their math grades or musical talent compares to a sibling’s.
Aguirre recalled one way that his mother cleverly eliminated the chance that any of her eight children might accuse her of favoritism.
“When my mom was dying, we were all spending time with her. She said, could she have a chat with each of us individually? And so I went in there, and she says, ‘I’m just going to tell you, you’re my favorite.’”
Later, after all the siblings had their one-on-ones, they spoke about it and discovered that she had told each one of them exactly the same thing.
