Parental Favoritism: What Parents Deny and Kids Quietly Track

Parental favoritism is the accusation almost every parent denies and almost every sibling remembers. Ask a room of parents whether they have a favorite child and you will get a chorus of no — some laughing, some faintly offended. Ask the grown children of those same parents, privately, and you will get names, dates, and a specific Christmas in 2009. The gap between those two answers is not a lie. It is the whole problem.

Parental favoritism is not about love. It is about the thousand small allocations.

When parents hear the word “favorite,” they hear love — and they are right to insist they love their children equally. That is usually true, and it is also beside the point. Children do not audit love. They audit distribution.

Who gets the benefit of the doubt when the story doesn’t add up. Who gets asked about their day first. Whose bad mood is treated as a mood and whose is treated as a character flaw. Who is trusted with the car, the money, the secret. Who gets the sigh. Researchers call this parental differential treatment, and the phrase is more useful than “favoritism” precisely because it is so unglamorous. It isn’t a throne. It’s a ledger — warmth, attention, conflict, discipline, autonomy — kept in a hundred entries a week, most of them made without thinking.

Parents remember the intent behind each entry. Children only ever see the ledger.

Siblings compare constantly — and the comparison is what does the damage. Photo: Janko Ferlič / Unsplash.

What the research actually found — and it isn’t the child you’d guess

In January 2025, a meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin pooled data from roughly 19,000 people across dozens of studies to ask a blunt question: is differential treatment real, and if so, who gets favored? The answer, from Alexander Jensen at Brigham Young University and McKell Jorgensen-Wells, was that it is real and it is patterned.

Both mothers and fathers, on average, tilted slightly toward daughters. Children who scored high on conscientiousness — the responsible, organized, homework-already-done ones — also drew more favorable treatment, largely because they generated less conflict. And when the currency was autonomy and control, parents tended to favor the older sibling.

Sit with the second finding for a moment, because it is the least comfortable one. The “easy” child is not being rewarded for being lovable. They are being rewarded for being low-friction. Favoritism, in a lot of households, is not affection at all. It is the path of least resistance, repeated until it hardens into a family fact.

Which means the child who is hardest to parent — the one who argues, who needs three reminders, who is going through something — is structurally positioned to receive less warmth at exactly the moment they need more of it. Nobody decided this. The system just drifts there when nobody is watching.

And the cost lands on everyone, including the favorite

Here is the finding that most surprises people. Jill Suitor and Karl Pillemer’s long-running Within-Family Differences Study, which has followed hundreds of aging mothers and their adult children, found that perceived maternal favoritism is associated with higher depressive symptoms — not only among the children who feel passed over, but among the ones who believe they are preferred.

Being the favorite is not a prize. It comes with a job: be the good one, carry the parent’s disappointment about the others, absorb the resentment of your siblings, and never, ever fall apart. Golden children often arrive in therapy in their forties with a strange, guilty grief they cannot name. They got everything, and it cost them their siblings.

The same body of work suggests something even more important about mechanism: what predicts distress is not the absolute quality of your relationship with your parent. It is the comparison. A child with a merely okay relationship with their mother, in a family where everyone’s relationship is merely okay, tends to do fine. A child with a good relationship, in a family where a sibling has a great one, does not. We are not measuring what we got. We are measuring the gap.

The finding that should change how you parent: fairness is not sameness

If differential treatment were straightforwardly toxic, the prescription would be simple — treat them identically. That prescription is both impossible and, it turns out, wrong.

Work by Amanda Kowal and Laurie Kramer on children’s understanding of parental differential treatment found that the harm doesn’t track the treatment. It tracks the perceived legitimacy of the treatment. When children could articulate a reason — he’s four years younger, she was sick that month, I get more freedom because I’m older, he needs more help with reading — they rated the difference as fair, and it did not corrode their well-being or their sibling relationship. When the difference was unexplained, it was read as a verdict on their worth.

Children are not egalitarians. They are lawyers. They do not need equal outcomes; they need a reason that holds up. An eight-year-old can accept that her brother gets more of Dad’s time this month because he’s struggling in school. What she cannot accept — what will lodge in her for thirty years — is that he gets more and nobody will say why.

Children don’t need identical treatment. They need a reason that makes sense. Photo: Chris Hardy / Unsplash.

What to actually do about it

Stop defending, start narrating. The instinct when a child says “you always let her” is to litigate the claim — that’s not true, last week I…. You will win that argument and lose the child. The better move is to skip the verdict and supply the reason: “You’re right that she’s getting more of my time right now. She’s having a hard month. In two weeks that’s going to be you and Saturday morning, and I mean it.” You have not conceded a crime. You have made the ledger visible.

Audit the friction, not the affection. Once a month, ask yourself a quiet question: which of my children is easiest to be around, and how much extra am I giving them for it? Then ask the harder one: what has the difficult one been getting less of, precisely because they’re difficult? That’s usually where the drift is.

Watch your out-loud comparisons. “Why can’t you be more like your sister” is the obvious one. The subtler and more common version is praise: bragging about one child’s grades in front of the other, telling a story about how easy one baby was. Children file both.

Check whether you and your co-parent are compensating. A very common pattern is one parent unconsciously attaching to the easy child while the other attaches to the struggling one — each of them balancing the system and each of them, from a child’s-eye view, confirming it. This is worth naming out loud with your partner; it belongs on the same table as every other invisible division of labor, and if it never gets discussed, it never gets corrected. (We’ve written about how much of this goes undiscussed in the mental load and parenting as a team.)

If you were the disfavored one, say the true sentence. Adult siblings often try to relitigate childhood by getting the parent to confess. They almost never will — and demanding it, in most cases, only entrenches the denial. The more workable move is horizontal: talk to your sibling, not your parent. The favored child usually knows. The relief of hearing “yes, that happened, and it wasn’t your fault” is often more repairing than any apology a parent is capable of giving.

The thing parents get wrong, in one line

Parents work hard to be fair. Children are grading something else entirely: whether the family’s differences have been explained. You cannot love your children identically — they are different people, and you are a different parent to each of them. What you can do is refuse to let the differences stay silent. Silence is the part that turns a normal, unavoidable imbalance into a story a child tells themselves about their own worth for the next forty years.

Say the reason out loud. That’s most of the work.

A note on the harder end of this: what’s described here is ordinary differential treatment in loving families. Sustained scapegoating — where one child is consistently blamed, ridiculed, or held responsible for a family’s problems — is a different and more serious pattern, and it often accompanies other forms of harm. If that describes your family, past or present, a therapist who works with family systems is worth seeking out; you don’t have to sort it out alone.

More on the quiet mechanics of family life in our Family Life & Parenting section, or read good enough parenting on why repair beats getting it right.