Time: Science of Favoritism

[SallyJ]

Not sure there's much science, but it was an interesting read. I haven't read the blog entry but here's the link to that: blogs.babble.com/being-pregnant/2011/03/15/mom-confession-i-think-i-love-my-son-a-little-bit-more/

There are 5 pages total in the Time article - I only copied the first two.

Read more: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094371,00.html#ixzz1yFOPivI5

There's sweetness in the lies parents tell their kids, which is a very good thing, since they tell a lot of them. Yes, that indecipherable crayon scribble looks exactly like Grandma. No, I didn't put that tooth-fairy money under your pillow. The fibs — nearly all of them harmless — may differ depending on the family. But from clan to clan, culture to culture, there's one tall tale nearly all parents tell, and they tell it repeatedly: "We do not have a favorite child."
(Watch TIME's video "When Parents Play Favorites.")

Mom and Dad will say it earnestly, they'll repeat it endlessly, and in an overwhelming share of cases, they'll be lying through their teeth. It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it — the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back. The unfavored kids howl about it like wounded cats. And on pain of death, the parents deny it all.

The stonewalling is understandable. Most parents want to spare unfavored kids the hurt that true candor could cause. Moreover, the court of public opinion can respond pitilessly — even furiously — to moms or dads who speak the forbidden truth. Last March, a mother of two wrote a candid post on the website Babble.com under the headline I THINK I LOVE MY SON JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE. The mom went on at length describing the greater warmth she feels for her baby boy compared with her toddler girl and even included a photo of herself and her unfavored daughter.

She was, predictably, blowtorched. "Please work on your issues lady!" said one typical response. "I feel absolutely horrible for your daughter!" read another. But then there was this: "I completely understand. I too feel this way."

The hard truth is, most parents do. In one oft cited study, Catherine Conger, a professor of human and community development at the University of California at Davis, assembled a group of 384 sibling pairs and their parents and visited them three times over three years. She questioned them about their relationships and videotaped them as they worked through conflicts. Overall, she concluded that 65% of mothers and 70% of fathers exhibited a preference for one child, usually the older one. And those numbers are almost certainly lowballs, since parents try especially hard to mask their preferences when a researcher is watching.

If the scientists don't see through the ploy, however, kids usually do — and react accordingly. From the moment they're born, brothers and sisters constantly jostle for the precious resource of parental attention, each fighting to establish an identity that will best catch Mom's or Dad's eye. I'm the smart one! I'm the funny one!

Just who will win that love-me-best sweepstakes is hard to predict. The father-son bond is the stuff of legend — unless it's the father-daughter one that's the rule in your family. A mother innately understands her daughters — unless the girls turn out to be a mystery to her and she adores one of her boys best. It's equally hard to predict the fallout from favoritism. Being the favorite may boost self-esteem and confidence. But studies show it can also leave kids with a sense of arrogance and entitlement. Unfavored children may grow up wondering if they're somehow unworthy of the love the parents lavished on the golden child. But they may do better at forging relationships outside the family as a result of that. And there's no telling how the differential treatment will play out among the kids.

"My mom didn't like my older sister and did like me," says Roseann Henry, an editor and the married mother of two girls. "Everyone assumed I had it great, except that my sister tortured me pretty much all the time — and really, what affects daily life more for a kid, the approval of a parent or the day-to-day torment of an older sister?"

Nature's Rules
If the parental habit of assigning different values to different children can cause such pain, it's hard to understand why it ever became such a firmly established part of human nature. As with so much else in child-rearing behavior, it begins with the parents' survival needs: the biologically narcissistic act of replicating themselves through succeeding generations. This impels Mom and Dad to tilt in favor of their biggest, healthiest offspring, since those kids will be more reproductively successful and get more of the family's genes into the next generation.

That kind of reductionist, bottom-line behavior is something we share with creatures throughout the animal kingdom. A crested-penguin mother will kick the smaller of her two eggs out of the nest, the better to focus on the presumably heartier chick in the bigger shell. A black-eagle mother will watch idly while her bigger chick rips her smaller one to ribbons. "The function of the second chick is insurance," says Douglas Mock, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma. "If the first chick is healthy, the policy is canceled." Humans may be a lot smarter than black eagles — and certainly more loving — but we're driven by the same evolutionary impulses, even if we're unaware of them.

The most conspicuous sign of fitness, of course, is physical appearance, and parents have a connoisseur's eye for what's appealing in a child. I was the second of four in an all-boy brood, and by almost any measure, the third in line, Garry, should have been the favorite, simply because he was gorgeous, born with extravagantly long eyelashes, absurdly perfect features and platinum blond hair that completed his found-in-a-cabbage-patch look.

There is not a parent on the planet who would admit to favoring a beautiful child over a less beautiful one, but scientists aren't constrained by the same pretense of impartiality. Long-standing bodies of work point to humans' deeply wired bias for the lovely over the less so — in the family, in the workplace and certainly in the dating market. It's part of what psychologist and sibling expert Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands in California calls the "general heuristic that things that are attractive are healthy and good and smart."

For all this, however, Garry wasn't the favorite. For my father, it was Steve, the oldest, a selection made mostly on the basis of primogeniture. That's not uncommon. Firstborns are often the family's favorite, and the reason is one corporations understand well: the rule of sunk costs. The more effort you've made developing a product, the more committed you are to seeing it come to fruition. "There's a kind of resource capital parents pour into firstborns," says Ben Dattner, a business consultant and organizational psychologist at New York University. "They build up a sort of equity in them."

And that equity often pays off. The oldest in most families have historically been the tallest and strongest, thanks to the fact that at the beginning of their lives, they don't have to share food stores with other kids. One 2007 Norwegian study similarly showed that firstborns have a 3-point IQ advantage over later siblings, partly a result of being the exclusive focus of their parents' attention in the earliest part of life. These benefits accrue like compounding interest. A small IQ advantage, for example, may yield a similar edge in SAT scores, which may tip a firstborn off the Harvard waiting list and into the entering class.

For my mother, none of this firstborn promise mattered. In her case, the favorite was Bruce, the youngest. That, in a way, was my father's doing too. Having had his fill with babymaking, our father wasn't enthusiastic about having a fourth child so soon after the third and expressed that antipathy toward Bruce in a number of ways — not least with an unpardonably free hand with corporal punishment, once administered when Bruce's only crime was crying in his crib or toddler bed before falling asleep. My mother matched my father's negative bias with a fiercely protective positive one, and when Bruce later acquired the last-born's signature gifts — a bright wit, a natural charisma and a perceptiveness that made him instinctively empathetic — the love match was set. (Last-borns develop such a suite of skills defensively: the ability to disarm and charm — what sibling psychologists call a low-power strategy — is an essential survival skill in a playroom in which you're the smallest.)

Favoring the most vulnerable child is a counterintuitive choice, at least in survival terms. Playing by black-eagle rules, my father's hostility toward my baby brother ought to have doomed him in my mother's eyes too. A child who's already being ill treated by one parent has hurdles to overcome just getting out of childhood in one piece, much less making it to a procreative adulthood. Best for a mom with years of child rearing ahead to cut her losses now.

[wawa]

Fascinating.

Also my little sister is apparently a quintessential youngest child.

Though it's a bit of a tossup as to which of us is the favorite. When we were kids my sister would have told you it was me in a hot second. I was an easy child. Sister was much much less so, so her relationship with mama was always a bit more tense than mine. But she had mom to herself for 4 years after I left for college, and they got a lot closer.

I honestly don't remember who said this to me first - but one of the grownups in my life told me when I was a kid that parents love all their kids equally and unconditionally. But since they're human they can't help but LIKE some of them better than others. Seems reasonable to me.

[cookiemdough]

As an only child, I have to admit that it scares me that as a mother that I may favor one child over another. I don't really know the dynamics of having siblings in the household and how to ensure that I understand and recognize the personality differences while showing both that they are loved equally even though it may look different based on the needs of the kid. Maybe I am overthinking it.

[meshaliuknits]

I was my mama's favorite, my middle sister was my grandmothers favorite, and my youngest sister was my father's favorite.

We all knew who was whose favorite and I don't think it had a whole lot of impact on our relationships with each other. Of course, my youngest sister is the only one who got any long-term benefit from being someone's favorite, so maybe that was why.

[IIOY]

Bookmarking to read later.

I worry that I favor my son out of protective instinct, given his issues. My DD is bigger, stronger, and more independent, so I simply worry about her less. She also has a needy, whiny streak that aggravates me to no end. I work hard to confer equal treatment on them and find myself doing a mental fist pump when my son gives me reason to discipline him.

My H was the less favored child and the scars can indeed run deep, so I'm hypersensitive to this issue and may be over-thinking things.

[marie427]

This stuff fascinates me, and this is the kind of thread where I do love to read lots of anecdotes lol.

Speaking as a non-parent, if you have several kids I feel like it's bound to happen. It's hard to just love everyone equally, especially if your kids are very different from one another. The hardest part would be not making that very obvious!

[msmerymac]

My brother and I each swear that the OTHER one was our parents' favorite.

My mother swears up and down that I'm my father's favorite and he doesn't treat my brother well. My mother and I are very close, and have very similar personalities... which also creates conflict. Because of her perception that my brother is practically bullied by my father, she's very protective of him. So she loves me a lot and I love her, but I'm voting that my brother is her favorite.

But trust me, my parents were VERY good at hiding this when we were growing up. After my parents' divorced, my brother thinks he got the short end of the stick from our dad (he decided not to pay for college, leaving my mom and my brother's student loans to do so, after financing much of my college degree), and my mom, who, hello, just went through a nasty divorce with the guy, just took his side. She also claims it's family dynamics - my dad always wanted his own father to be proud of him, because he knew his older sister was the favorite. And then he just ended up modeling the same behavior.

[cookiemdough]

You guys are scaring me.

[curmudgeon]

Sure sometimes it sucks being less favored, I also know that I was not the least favored (everyone loves my oldest brother, my parents each outright disliked one of my other two brothers, and I was smack somewhere in the middle). I do have to commend my parents that they really did try to keep things somewhat balanced, but when you flat prefer the company of one person, that is who you spend more time with and this is much more obvious now that we are adults. Also, I think being in the middle in both preference and age pushed me to work my ass off, for example I'm the only one who went to college and was the first one with a good, stable job, so there's that. I am my grandfather's favorite though. Actually, upon reflection, I was my sperm-donor's favorite, until he put my brother and I up for adoption to my step-father, by then my baby sister was solidly favorite.

It is actually really sad to watch my mom's family, she is clearly the less favored and no one even tries to pretend otherwise.

[heightsyankee]

My husband is very tight with my older son. My younger son and I are attached at the hip. My older son favors my husband physically. My younger son favors me. Interesting...

[curmudgeon]

Jun 19, 2012 10:47:23 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

You guys are scaring me.

It's ok, it's normal and nothing new. The hard part seems to be not making it too obvious and as long as you are fair and loving toward all of them things will work out fine. IME, spending quality time with each really seems to go a long way.

[meg]

which one of us is the favorite/the golden child is a running joke in my family (my brother is the golden child fo sho but favorite is up for debate). I think that they did a good job of loving us evenly if not equally, if that makes sense. We all got what we needed from them when we needed it, and those needs varied. My father grew up in a very uneven family and bends over backwards to make sure that we all are treated equally financially. And while of course what you actually GET from your parents isnt necessarily that big a thing compared to the emotional stuff, perceptions of uneven THINGS can cause deep scars.

We are all very different and I know that my parents love us all for who we each are, and I think that seeing a sibling relationship can make you love them both more if that makes sense. There have been times where it feels like one is favored, and I know we all feel like there are moments where things arent fair etc but I think over time we are pretty well evened out.

I will say that I would bet money that my one sister would say she was the one who got the short end of the stick. But she suffers from some pretty major middle-child-syndrome, and no one else really sees her lot that way. So I think that sometimes one sibling's account in isolation isnt necessarily to be trusted. I know this is the case for my mom's nuclear family too - her brother tells the story of being the one who had it worst - and he did have it bad, but he also doesnt acknowledge the bad stuff my mom and her sister also got (alcoholic father etc).

[mominatrix]

Jun 19, 2012 9:23:00 GMT -5 wawa said:

I honestly don't remember who said this to me first - but one of the grownups in my life told me when I was a kid that parents love all their kids equally and unconditionally. But since they're human they can't help but LIKE some of them better than others. Seems reasonable to me.

This is wise.

I love both mine equally and unconditionally, but the girl is a complete mystery to me. She's everything I'm not - brash, uncompromising, outgoing.

The boy, I get, and I have always gotten. His favorite toy went missing last night, I told him we'd look for it in the morning, he said, ”oh, ok.” He's two. The girl is five, if her favorite toy went missing, it would be a total melt down until it was found.

I love the qualities in her that I don't have in me, but sometimes she's harder on me, because we don't seem to speak the same language.

Right now, I'm spending a lot of energy convincing myself that my relationship with her will be extremely rewarding, in the long run, because she's making me stretch my boundaries and perceptions so much.

But I love them both, unconditionally, absolutely. ...and equally.


Sent from my HTC Glacier using ProBoards... So excuse any wonky autocorrect.

[heightsyankee]

Jun 19, 2012 11:14:16 GMT -5 nuggetbrain said:

The closest she came to admitting that she fucked up in raising him to be so coddled and entitled and with poor coping skills for life was when she told me at dinner one night that I turned out how she thought he would, and he turned out how she though I would. And since I know she thought I'd wouldn't amount to much and he'd be some big-shot, successful person it was kind of awesome.

While over all that sucks and I'm sure was painful (and probably still is), I do love this sweet revenge part at the end

[Melissa W.]

Eh. It depends on the day who is my favorite. Some days I like one more than the other.

[ladybrettashley]

Jun 19, 2012 11:14:16 GMT -5 nuggetbrain said:

The closest she came to admitting that she fucked up in raising him to be so coddled and entitled and with poor coping skills for life was when she told me at dinner one night that I turned out how she thought he would, and he turned out how she though I would. And since I know she thought I'd wouldn't amount to much and he'd be some big-shot, successful person it was kind of awesome.

This is very interesting. I think this highlights more than anything the importance for parents to do their best to treat all their kids as fairly as possible. Because in your case, your mother based her actions on how she thought you would both turn out, but it turned out it was your mother's actions themselves that helped shape you and your brother.

In my family, my siblings and I used to always discuss who was the favorite. We pretty much came to a consensus when we were younger that my brother (youngest) was both my parents' favorite. Now that we're adults, we've decided that my sister (oldest) is my mom's favorite and I'm my dad's favorite. Who knows though. It's never really had much effect on us.

[dirtyred]

I've known my entire life that my brother is the favorite. I call him "The Crown Prince."

I got my mother to admit this to me a few years ago. What really gets me is that my parents thought they were hiding it well. What? He gets a car on his birthday and I get a hairdryer? You thought I wouldn't pick up on that?

[cookiemdough]

What is the logic people use when they choose to pay for one child's education and let the other kid fend for themselves?

[IIOY]

Jun 19, 2012 11:33:48 GMT -5 dirtyred said:

. What really gets me is that my parents thought they were hiding it well. What? He gets a car on his birthday and I get a hairdryer? You thought I wouldn't pick up on that?

The story is far more complicated but among other things, H's parents pulled precisely this sort of bullshit. I can understand subtle favoritism but how do you justify blatant, in-your-face favoritism of this nature?

Unfortunately his mother denied any favoritism until the day she died, so H never got closure on this.

[SallyJ]

I confronted my mom about loving my sister more. She confirmed that she did indeed love my sister more 'because she needed it and I didn't'. I really just wish she would have lied even if deep down I knew the truth.

My dad always favored my brother over all of the girls and parented with a double standard between us (i.e. kicked me out of the house for dating a black guy, but encouraged my brother to date whoever he wanted.) He made several comments that made us feel like he thought less of women (i.e. shouldn't work, shouldn't be educated, etc). My sisters and I still struggle with the 'why' now that he has passed. I think my dad was a not so closeted racist and mysoginist is really the only reason. Neither of my parents were obviously model parents.

I am very similar in personality to my daughter and that creates conflict between us. I also struggled to bond with her at first because I didn't experience pregnancy or get to nurse her (and I was nursing her brother nearly around the clock still when she came home), plus I was dealing with the peak of PPD when she came home. I love her fiercely but her passion and high emotions rarely jive with my own passion and high emotions. Fortunately she is daddy's little girl--she is such a little tom boy and has these undeniable big brown eyes and adorable smile that he just can't say no to. I'm very close with my son, he thinks very similar to me but is laid back like my husband. Of course he and my husband battle quite a bit. Finding the right balance for the two children when they are different personalities and have different needs can be a huge challenge.

[IIOY]

Jun 19, 2012 11:34:43 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

What is the logic people use when they choose to pay for one child's education and let the other kid fend for themselves?

This happened to my H and his brother, which meant my BIL was able to attend an Ivy while H had to attend a cheaper school AND work his way through AND live at home because he couldn't afford on-campus housing.

He has challenged his parents in front of me on this issue multiple times and I still can't tell you what their rationale was.

[wrathofkuus]

Some of these favoritism stories are ridiculous. I hope a few of you are re-fucking-lentless on the guilt trip on your douchey parents, that's all I can say.

[ttt]

Jun 19, 2012 11:47:46 GMT -5 wrathofkuus said:

Some of these favoritism stories are ridiculous. I hope a few of you are re-fucking-lentless on the guilt trip on your douchey parents, that's all I can say.

For real.

My brother is my mom's favorite, but she's never treated us blatantly different like paying for one's college and not the other. It's more how she talks about us to people "Oh my son is in a wonderful prestigious job and does all these wonderful things and...I have a daughter too."

[wawa]

Yeah, when I say that I suspect I was my mother's favorite I just mean that she seemed to have more fun with me when we hung out, rather than clashing over stuff like she did with my sister.

I cannot even begin to imagine some of the straight up bullshit that some of your parents pulled. I'm so sorry. You're all MY favorite out of your siblings.

[meg]

Jun 19, 2012 11:34:43 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

What is the logic people use when they choose to pay for one child's education and let the other kid fend for themselves?

This happened in my dad's family. He was left high and dry while his brother and sister were sent to $$ schools plus grad school. My dad joined the AF, went back to school on the GI bill and ended up making much more of himself than either of them.

But, trust, that shit is not ever forgotten.

[Deleted]

Jun 19, 2012 11:47:46 GMT -5 wrathofkuus said:

Some of these favoritism stories are ridiculous. I hope a few of you are re-fucking-lentless on the guilt trip on your douchey parents, that's all I can say.

Amen, sister.

If my mom had a favorite among us, I didn't know it.

I do think she likes me a bit more than my brothers now but I think that's more the difference in where we all are in our lives and the difference in our relationships with her. But even with that, I know for absolute certain she doesn't love any of us more than the other. She has a deep love for each of us, each in our own ways.

And I feel the same way about my own kids.

[msmerymac]

Jun 19, 2012 11:34:43 GMT -5 cookiemdough said:

What is the logic people use when they choose to pay for one child's education and let the other kid fend for themselves?

It was a combination of a lot of things in my family. My father expected bigger things from me than my brother. I did very well in school, my brother had a learning disability. Until my brother was 15 or 16, my mom said, "Well, I've come to accept the fact that your brother might not go to college, and that's okay." He seemed headed towards a career in the military (navy or coast guard) for a while.

Then when he was a junior in high school he decided he really, really wanted to go to college. He got an AA in audio production, then stayed to re-take a few classes and get his GPA up, then transferred to a 4 year public university. It did eventually take him like 6 years between the two to get his BA, but now he's in graduate school!

I went to a private high school (brother also thought that showed favoritism, since he went to public), I went to a private college and graduated in 3 years. About half of my education was paid for by a trust my mom's mother left me. I was a resident assistant, which paid most of my room and board. But my parents still had about $8-$10k a year in estimated family contribution they paid on their own. My brother ended up with something like $30k in public AND private student loans from undergrad.

The other part was the divorce. My mom was always BIG on education and I knew I'd go to college for as long as I can remember. My parents divorced when my brother was still in CC and my dad basically realized he didn't HAVE to pay for anything for his "adult" kids. He mentioned this once to his aunt and it caused a falling out.

But with me? It seemed like he was glad to pay for it. In high school and my first year of college, working during the school year wasn't necessary, because it might get in the way of my grades. He paid my car insurance while I was in college because my "job" was to go to school.

(Granted, I starting paying my own car insurance when I was 21 - my brother is 27 and my mom still pays his car insurance, which I guess is an example of how she favors him.)

Weird though - my parents were egalitarian in that my brother and I both got 6/7 year old cars, and basically the same make and model, when we were 18. There was a lot of equality in those ways growing up.

So, in conclusion, it's okay to treat children differently if they are DIFFERENT, but blatantly favoring one is not okay. Like, having different expectations based on your children's personalities or skill sets is cool. But when one outshines your expectations, don't be disappointed.


Also, my BFF's parents are paying for her sister to go to college. She got into an Ivy League school and they wouldn't pay a cent - she ended up working 3 jobs at a public university and still had to leave after 3 years because she couldn't do it anymore. She's pretty much estranged from her parents now, but when she found that out, it really, really hurt.

[blindyswife]

This make me nervous about having more children. I already can't imagine loving any other person as much as I love my son... I don't want my kids to have any real or imagined perceptions of being loved less than their sibling.

I have one sister, and I didn't see any issues with favoritism from our parents. Maybe she would have a different take on that? My H, on the other hand, has always thought his brother was the favorite. His parents are very equal with affections, gifts, etc., but he's always felt that they are more proud of his brother. From my outside perspective, I think he's got it backward and his parents relate more to, and have more in common with him.

I guess I think perception is key here.

[KateAggie]

Jun 19, 2012 12:17:19 GMT -5 @habbsies said:

Jun 19, 2012 11:47:46 GMT -5 wrathofkuus said:

Some of these favoritism stories are ridiculous. I hope a few of you are re-fucking-lentless on the guilt trip on your douchey parents, that's all I can say.

Amen, sister.

If my mom had a favorite among us, I didn't know it.

I do think she likes me a bit more than my brothers now but I think that's more the difference in where we all are in our lives and the difference in our relationships with her. But even with that, I know for absolute certain she doesn't love any of us more than the other. She has a deep love for each of us, each in our own ways.

And I feel the same way about my own kids.

Ditto. I cannot imagine growing up with blatant favoritism or treating my own kids in that way.

[arborgold]

I was my mother's first child, and she married my stepfather (my "dad") when I was two. My younger sister (their first child) is definitely my Dad's favorite, and my younger brother (their second) is definitely my mom's favorite (as the baby).

I'm fairly certain I was my maternal grandmother's favorite out of the 13 or so grandkids (SCORE!), but my paternal grandmother made it quite clear that I wasn't wanted on her side by telling me when I was five that my real father was going to come kidnap me and I would never see anyone I love again. Yeah...those scars can run pretty deep.