Ben White. CC0 Public domain via stocksnap
We are frequently asked why we spend our professional careers studying favoritism, after all, parents don’t really have favorites. Or do they? A woman recently approached us after a lecture we gave and told us about caring for her aging mother. Her story captures the importance of this issue. She visited her mother daily in the final year of her mother’s life to feed, bathe, and care for her. She had always felt that her sister was the favorite child, and she hoped this experience would change her status as the disfavored daughter. The hope went unrealized. On the day her mother died, she pulled the caregiving daughter’s face close to her own and whispered in her ear, “You know, I never really did like you very much and I still don’t.” Even a decade after the mother’s death, the two sisters have a very tense relationship, and the disfavored daughter continues to feel distressed about the relationship she had with her mother.
Popular and academic interest in favoritism and disfavoritism is not new. In the early 20th century Alfred Adler, a prominent psychotherapist who was not his mother’s favorite child, and Sigmund Freud, another prominent psychotherapist, who was his mother’s favorite, wrote about how parents’ favoritism could damage children emotionally and socially. Pop-psychology focused on the birth order aspect of these, and many people eventually came to believe that first-borns tend to be leaders, middle-born siblings are forgotten, and last-borns tend to be spoiled and rebellious. Many who believe in “birth-order determinism” implicitly believe favoritism plays a role in shaping our personalities. The science suggests, however, that it is less about personality and more about emotions, relationships, and mental health, and that it matters for adults too.
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I had never attributed my mental health issues to having a poor relationship with my mother whilst I saw my sister becoming ever closer to her. Having now read the articles which are linked to this item I can see that favouritism (or my perception of its existence) may have played a part. H.
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