As a child, Kara never thought of her parents as the types to play favorites.
Her youngest siblings always enjoyed extra attention and special privileges, like trips to Disneyland, but she had rationalized the behavior: The oldest children are meant to be more independent, she thought, and her parents probably had more money for vacations after she moved out.
But as she and her siblings grew up — and the special treatment continued — the evidence became glaring. Two years ago, when her parents called to say they planned to spend the holidays with her sisters, once again, and would not be flying to visit Kara and her children on Christmas, she had a moment of clarity.
“Suddenly it struck me that maybe there wasn’t a justification,” said Kara, who requested that her last name not be used to protect her family’s privacy. “Maybe those kids were always going to be the favorites.”
Kara came to resent that her parents overlooked her own children the same way they overlooked her. “Two generations of rejection,” she called it. And despite her best efforts to let go of the resentment and disappointment, the inequity affected her mental health.
“I just can’t get over the hurt,” she said.
Research from recent decades shows that versions of Kara’s experience are common for less favored siblings. In childhood, they are more likely to have poorer mental health, worse family relationships and less academic success than their siblings.
Other research shows that those family dynamics can affect mental health long past youth. One study found that whether adult children believed they were favored or disfavored was a stronger predictor of their mental health than almost any other factor measured, including marital status, employment and age. Only physical health was more closely correlated.
“You can talk to older adults and they’ll tell you what happened when they were 5,” said Laurie Kramer, who studies sibling relationships at Northeastern University. “They’re stuck on that.”
Who’s the Favorite?
In a society that frowns upon the unequal treatment of children, measuring parental favoritism 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 favoritism, she remembered her family’s skepticism.
“No one is going to answer your questions,” one family member warned. “Good parents don’t do that.”
So she and other favoritism 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 favoritism.
The first surprising result from this data was just how pervasive the favoritism was. Based on the study’s questions, roughly two-thirds of the parents had a preferred child. And that favorite sibling often stayed the same over decades.
There was no set of qualities that guaranteed being the golden child, but the favorites tended to be daughters and younger siblings. A large analysis published earlier this year similarly found that in childhood, daughters were more likely to get preferential treatment from their parents. (Parental favoritism 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 favor children with agreeable, conscientious personality traits, most likely because they are slightly easier to parent, said Alex Jensen, a researcher at Brigham Young University and an author of the large analysis from this year.
And Dr. 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’ favoritism.
“We had moms who visited their kids in prison every week,” Dr. Suitor said. “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 favoritism is irrelevant, Dr. Suitor said.
In studies examining the mental health consequences of favoritism, 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, said Dr. Kramer, who was an author of the study.
“We’re all thinking about it,” she said. “But no one talks about these things.”
‘I’ve Always Loved Your Sister More’
The research on the effects of parental favoritism, Dr. Jensen said, 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 disfavored are more likely to have anxiety and depression, have strained family relationships and engage in risky behaviors, like drinking and smoking, as teenagers.
It’s hard to know exactly how to interpret these findings. Because parental favoritism studies are observational, researchers can’t tease out whether the favoritism caused those negative effects, or whether, say, children who are prone to mental health conditions are less likely to curry favor.
But Dr. Kramer said 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, Dr. Kramer said 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 pajamas 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 favorite. 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, said Susan Branje, the head of department of education and pedagogy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
“Children like equality and fairness in relationships,” she said.
The sting of differential treatment does not appear to lessen over time. Parental favoritism mattered as much to adult children entering their 60s as it did to them in their 40s, Dr. Suitor said. One woman admitted to Dr. 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 favoritism has such a profound impact shouldn’t be surprising, she said.
“These are very deep attachments and they’re ones we have all of our lives,” she said. “They are the person you feel should love you the most.”
Teddy Rosenbluth is a Times reporter covering health news, with a special focus on medical misinformation.
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