As a child, Kara never thought of her parents as the types to play favourites.
Her youngest siblings always enjoyed extra attention and special privileges, like trips to Disneyland, but she had rationalised the behaviour: 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 favourites.”
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 favoured 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 favoured or disfavoured 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.”
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 the 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.
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 earlier 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, 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’ favouritism.
New York Times News Service