“You can talk to older adults and they’ll tell you what happened when they were five,” said Laurie Kramer, who studies sibling relationships at Northeastern University. “They’re stuck on that.”
Who’s the favourite?
In a society that frowns upon the unequal treatment of children, measuring parental favouritism is no easy feat.
When J. Jill Suitor, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, first set out to recruit mothers to what would become the largest longitudinal study on the effect of parental favouritism, she remembered her family’s scepticism.
“No one is going to answer your questions,” one family member warned. “Good parents don’t do that.”
So she and other favouritism researchers developed a more oblique line of questioning: Which child do you spend more resources on? Whom do you feel emotionally closer with? Whom are you more disappointed in?
In 2001, she recruited more than 500 mothers, each of whom had two or more adult children, and began tracking the answers to some of those questions. She has now studied the same families for so long that she has started collecting data on the effects of grandparental favouritism.
The first surprising result from this data was just how pervasive favouritism was. Based on the study’s questions, roughly two-thirds of the parents had a preferred child. And that favourite sibling often stayed the same over decades.
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There was no set of qualities that guaranteed being the golden child, but the favourites tended to be daughters and younger siblings. A large analysis published this year similarly found that in childhood, daughters were more likely to get preferential treatment from their parents. (Parental favouritism research often focuses on families with two children, leaving middle children once again overlooked.)
But it’s not just superficial factors like birth order and gender that make a difference. Parents tended to favour children with agreeable, conscientious personality traits, most likely because they are slightly easier to parent, says Alex Jensen, a researcher at Brigham Young University and an author of the large analysis from this year.
Research shows that favoured children can produce favoured grandchildren.Credit: Getty Images
And Suitor found that in adulthood, the most important factor “hands down” was whether parents and children had similar values, including on religious and political topics.
She found in her longitudinal study that factors adult children thought might improve their standing (like career accomplishments) or hurt it (like addiction or getting arrested) actually had little bearing on their mothers’ favouritism.
“We had mums who visited their kids in prison every week,” Suitor says. “They said, ‘I’m very close to Johnny. This wasn’t his fault. He’s a good boy.’”
In some ways, though, parents’ own perception of their favouritism is irrelevant, Suitor said.
In studies examining the mental health consequences of favouritism, it was far more important whether the children perceived unequal treatment. And one study found that parents and children disagreed more than half the time when asked about the amount of differential treatment, who benefited from that inequity and whether the differences were perceived as fair.
Part of the problem is that parents rarely discuss these topics with their children, says Kramer, who was an author of the study.
“We’re all thinking about it,” she says. “But no one talks about these things.”
‘I’ve always loved your sister more’
The research on the effects of parental favouritism, Jensen says, can be summed up succinctly: “Across the board, it’s not good.”
From a very young age, children closely monitor how they’re treated compared with their siblings. Those who feel they’re disfavoured are more likely to have anxiety and depression, have strained family relationships and engage in risky behaviours, like drinking and smoking, as teenagers.
It’s hard to know exactly how to interpret these findings. Because parental favouritism studies are observational, researchers can’t tease out whether the favouritism caused those negative effects or whether, say, children who are prone to mental health conditions are less likely to curry favour.
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But Kramer says that the research builds a convincing argument that parents should at least broach the taboo topic more often.
When parents must treat their kids differently, Kramer says they should explain the reasoning. Maybe that means explaining that a brother needs more help with homework because he’s struggling in school. Or that a sister needs new pyjamas because her old set is fraying.
If a child understands the reason for the discrepancy, many of the negative effects seem to fall away.
There are downsides to being the favourite. While some may benefit from small amounts of inequity, they suffer when the gap between them and their siblings becomes too large. Golden children may feel guilty or undeserving when the differences in treatment are so obvious, says Susan Branje, the head of department of education and pedagogy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“Children like equality and fairness in relationships,” she says.
The sting of differential treatment does not appear to lessen over time. Parental favouritism mattered as much to adult children entering their 60s as it did to them in their 40s, Suitor says. One woman admitted to Suitor that after 15 years, she was still haunted by her mother’s deathbed confession: “I’ve always loved your sister more.”
The fact that favouritism has such a profound impact shouldn’t be surprising, she says.
“These are very deep attachments and they’re ones we have all of our lives,” she says. “They are the person you feel should love you the most.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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