The favourite child: a quiet inequality in the family

Sunday lunch. Your mother puts the soup on the table and says in passing: “Matej’s been promoted again, did you know? And he still dropped in on Wednesday, with all the work he has.” You were there on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. You drove her to the doctor and changed the light bulb in the hallway. Nobody at the table mentions that. You swallow the soup, and with it something you have known since primary school.

Most families have a sentence that parents say almost automatically: “I love all my children the same.” I believe they mean it. And yet nearly everyone who grew up with a brother or sister knows who was allowed more, who was forgiven sooner and whose stories were told to the relatives. It is rarely said aloud in the family, which is why I call it a quiet inequality.

In this post I am not interested in which parent is to blame. I am interested in what happens to the family as a whole when one of the children is given a special place: what it means for the one who did not get it, what it means for the one who did, and why this story so often returns in adulthood at exactly the moment the parents need help.

What research says about the “favourite child”

Researchers do not have a cosy word for it. They speak of parental differential treatment: a parent giving one child more warmth, time, trust or help, and another more criticism or control. The term is deliberately dry, because it does not assume that the parent loves one child more. It describes behaviour, not love.

The most systematic work in this field has been done by the American sociologists J. Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer. In a long-running study they interviewed mothers aged 65 to 75 and, separately, their adult children. They did not ask the mothers whom they loved most. They asked which child they felt emotionally closest to, whom they would confide in about a personal problem, and whom they would want at their side if they fell ill. Roughly seven in ten mothers named one particular child when asked about closeness. The majority, in other words, not the exception.

That does not mean seven in ten mothers are bad mothers. It means that differentiating between children is an ordinary part of family life and that it does not end when the children leave home. The same research group showed that these choices are fairly stable over the years: when the same mothers were asked again several years later, they often named the same child.

This breakdown matters because it shows that “favourite” is not a single title. A mother may be emotionally closest to her daughter, lend money to her youngest son and argue most with her eldest. Each of the three has a good reason to feel that another one had the better deal.

Why parents do not treat children the same

The shortest answer is that children are not the same and a parent is not a machine. A large review of the research, published in 2025 by Alexander Jensen and McKell Jorgensen-Wells, found a few patterns. Parents are slightly more favourable towards daughters, although children themselves mostly do not notice this difference. Children who are conscientious and agreeable, the ones with whom daily life is easier, receive more favourable treatment. And older children are given more freedom, which is partly just a matter of age.

Suitor and Pillemer found something else among adult children: mothers often feel closest to the child who resembles them in values and outlook. Closeness follows the sense that someone understands you without everything having to be explained.

A family systems view adds a layer that questionnaires do not capture. A child is not born into an empty family but into a family at a particular moment. One arrives when the parents are in love and have time. Another arrives in the year the grandfather died, the father lost his job or the marriage was already creaking. A third looks like the mother-in-law with whom the mother never found common ground. The child has done nothing, and already carries a meaning given by the adults. I wrote about how everything in a family touches everything else in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

The favourite child is a role, not a reward

When I look at a family as a system, the question changes. I no longer ask whom the mother loves more, but what purpose it serves in this family that one of the children is special.

Sometimes the answer is innocent: one child is simply easier to be with. But sometimes the special child fills a space that someone else should be filling. A mother who cannot talk to her husband talks to her daughter. A father who feels overlooked in his marriage finds an admirer in his son. Salvador Minuchin, one of the founders of family therapy, called this a coalition across the generational boundary: a parent and a child are bound more tightly than the two parents are to each other. From the outside it looks like love. In reality the child has become part of their parents’ marriage. Two related phenomena are triangulation and parentification, where a child takes on care that belongs to an adult.

That is why “the favourite” is one of the family roles, much like the hero or the scapegoat, which I describe in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?. And a role is not a reward. It is a task you did not choose and cannot simply put down.

What the one who was not chosen carries

A child who notices that a brother gets more does not explain it by saying that Mum is tired or that the brother is an easier child. They explain it with the only thing they know: something is wrong with me. Research with children and adolescents confirms this; those who feel less loved than a sibling have, on average, lower self-esteem and more behavioural and emotional difficulties.

In adulthood this rarely shows up as open resentment. More often it looks like this:

• proving yourself without end: one more degree, one more favour, one more visit that nobody notices;
• an oversensitivity to fairness at work and in relationships, a careful count of who got how much;
• withdrawing behind “I don’t care anyway”, with a good deal of sadness behind it;
• the belief that love has to be earned and that someone else will always earn it better.

Here the subject touches on comparison. I described in detail how sentences such as “look at your sister” shape the way you see yourself in “Why can’t you be like your sister?” Sibling comparison and how you see yourself, so I will not repeat it here. The difference is that comparison is spoken aloud, while inequality often stays unspoken. Sometimes that is exactly what makes it harder: you have no sentence to point to.

What the one who was chosen carries

This is the part that surprises people most. Pillemer, Suitor and colleagues found that depressive symptoms among adult children are more common in families where the mother differentiates between her children, and not only among those who were left on the sidelines. A later analysis showed that the children who are emotionally closest to their mother also report more depressive symptoms.

Why would it be hard to be chosen? Because the special place comes with a bill. The favourite child is often the one who is expected to stay close, to understand, not to disappoint and one day to provide care. Their decision to move away, to choose a partner the parents dislike or to live differently is not just their own decision; it feels like a betrayal. Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy called this invisible loyalty: a debt nobody ever spoke of, which you nevertheless repay with your own choices.

The other part of the bill is presented by the siblings. The chosen child gets their mother’s closeness and their brother’s or sister’s coldness. They often feel guilty for something they did not do, and do not know whether they are even allowed to complain. Who would listen to complaints from the one who had everything?

“It was always easy for you. She loved you.”
“She needed me. That’s not the same thing.”
“It looks much the same to me.”
“You got to go and study in Maribor. I stayed, because otherwise it would have broken her.”
“You never said you wanted to go.”
“Nobody asked.”

(The dialogue is composed; these are not real people.)

What happens between siblings

Parental differential treatment does not stay between parent and child. It moves into the relationship between the children. Suitor and colleagues found, among adults in midlife, that sibling relationships are cooler and more strained when siblings perceive that their mother favours one of them, and this holds regardless of who the chosen one is. Boll, Ferring and Filipp found something similar in a German study of adults: relationships with siblings and with parents are at their best when people feel they are treated equally.

From a systemic point of view this makes sense. Siblings are meant to be a small group of their own within the family, a place where children learn negotiation, competition and making up without the adults. When a parent draws one of them close, that group falls apart. The children are no longer on the same side: one is “with Mum”, the other outside. I write about how such lines get drawn in a family in Siblings, alliances and coalitions: the invisible geometry of a family.

The result is a strange one: a brother and a sister are angry with each other over something a parent did. Anger at a parent is dangerous, because you are still hoping for something from them. Anger at a brother is safer.

When parents grow old, the old accounts are reopened

For long years all of this can lie dormant. Everyone has their own life, you see each other at holidays, and conversation stays with the weather and the children. Then Mum has a fall, Dad gets a diagnosis or the house has to be sold. Suddenly work, money and decisions have to be divided up, and the old allocation of roles is back as if thirty years had not passed.

According to the research, mothers have a fairly clear idea of which child should care for them, and it is often the one they feel emotionally closest to. So the chosen child receives one more task. The one who was not chosen faces two poor options: either help and go unnoticed again, as in the opening scene, or step back and confirm the picture the family already had of them. And when it comes to the will, the quarrel is rarely about the sum. More on that in Siblings and inheritance: when you argue over a watch but it’s about something else.

Exercise: a map of closeness in your family

For this exercise you need a sheet of paper and twenty quiet minutes. Its purpose is not to prove who had the better deal. Its purpose is to let you see the whole picture instead of one old scene.

1. Draw the family. Each parent and each child is a circle. Draw lines between them: thick where there was a lot of closeness, thin where there was little, zigzag where there was a lot of arguing. Draw it as it was when you were about twelve.
2. Separate the areas. For each parent in turn, write down which child they were closest to, whom they confided in most, whom they helped most and whom they criticised most. Check whether it is the same name every time.
3. Ask what purpose it served. What did the parent get from the child they were closest to? Company, admiration, an ally, peace? And what did that child pay for it?
4. Swap chairs. Write three sentences through your brother’s or sister’s eyes: “To me it seemed that …” You do not have to believe them. It is enough to write them.
5. Choose one thing that is yours. A pattern you still repeat today, such as proving yourself, withdrawing or caring without limits, and one small change this week.

If you would like to widen the picture to your grandparents, How to draw your own genogram: symbols, three generations and the right questions can help. It often turns out that your parent, too, was the chosen or the overlooked child in their own family.

Where this story does not hold

I have to say three things against my own argument.

First, different treatment is not yet injustice. A child with a chronic illness, a child with learning difficulties and a baby all need more, and most siblings understand that. Laurie Kramer and Amanda Kowal showed that differences harm children mainly when they experience them as unfair. When they understand why a brother gets more attention, there are hardly any consequences. Complete equality is not even the goal; a parent who buys both children the same shoes although one has bigger feet is not being fair.

Second, your memory is your point of view, not a set of minutes. Suitor and colleagues compared whom the mother actually named as the closest child with whom the children believed to be the chosen one. The children were often wrong. It is possible that you have lived for decades convinced that your brother was the favourite, while he has been just as convinced that it was you. That does not erase your experience. It does open the possibility that you were both looking at the same mother from different ends of the table.

Third, almost everything we know comes from the averages of large groups, and mostly from research on mothers in the United States. We know less about fathers. And an average does not tell you what happened in your kitchen. There are families where the difference was large and nobody carried it away as a wound, and families where it was small and hurt for a lifetime.

If you are a parent and recognise yourself here

To begin with: finding one child easier is not a sin. Nor is noticing it. The trouble starts when you are not allowed to notice, because then you cannot change anything either.

A few simple things help. Explain a difference in treatment in words a child can understand: “I’m helping Ana more just now because she’s having a hard time. It doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you.” Give each child some time that is theirs alone, however short. Do not confide in a child about things that belong with your partner or a friend; that is where the line runs that the term boundaries within a family describes. And if an adult child one day says they felt pushed aside, “that’s not true” is the least useful answer. Try “tell me what it was like for you.”

When it makes sense to look for help

You can talk about an old inequality on your own, with your brother, sister or parent, and sometimes one honest sentence is enough. Help makes sense when the pattern travels onwards: into your relationship, where you constantly measure who has given more; into work, where every word of praise from your manager to a colleague stings out of proportion; or into your own parenting, where you fear you are repeating the same thing. It also makes sense when care for a parent has to be arranged with your siblings and every conversation ends at who was whose favourite.

In relational family therapy these are exactly the threads we look at: what each of the children carried in the family, whom they were being loyal to by doing so, and what they are still paying for it today. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work with individuals, couples and families, in person in Ljubljana, and also in English. If you would first simply like to lay the family picture out, you can do that in the longer genogram session A Look into the Past. On whether a relationship with a parent can still shift in adulthood, see Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?.

What to remember

• Parents differentiating between children is common and lasts into adulthood; in Suitor and Pillemer’s study roughly seven in ten mothers named a child they felt closest to.
• In a family system the “favourite child” is a role with tasks: stay close, understand, do not disappoint, provide care.
• Both pay a price, the overlooked one in self-doubt and the chosen one in a loyalty that binds; the sibling relationship suffers too.
• A difference does harm mainly when it feels unfair and may not be talked about; a difference that comes from need and has an explanation mostly does not.
• Your memory of who was the favourite is real as an experience, but your brother or sister may hold an entirely different picture.