Parents Have Favorites, And Here’s How To Find Out If You Make The Cut
Parents always say that they don’t have a favorite child, but new research suggests otherwise. A new analysis of 30 studies, including nearly 20,000 participants, revealed that parents are more likely to favor daughters over sons. Additionally, parents exhibited a preference for children who were more agreeable than their siblings.
The findings may only apply to certain demographics since the studies in the analysis were conducted in North America and Western Europe and included mainly white people.
In this context, favoring a child does not necessarily mean that parents have “favorites.” Instead, they just treat certain children more positively than their siblings.
“It isn’t about the parents loving one child and hating the other,” said Alexander Jensen, a co-author of the study and an associate professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University in Utah. “It’s about being more affectionate with one of them, or spending more time with one of them.”
Previous research has shown that children who receive more favorable treatment from their parents are more likely to have better mental health outcomes, healthier relationships, increased academic success, and other benefits. The opposite is true for children who aren’t treated as favorably.
“I hope parents will use our study as a catalyst to consider how they may treat their children differently, then work to make sure those differences are fair and understood by their children,” said Jensen.
In the new analysis, the researchers looked at data from 30 scientific papers and 14 databases, which keep records of the family dynamics of 19,469 people.
Around 67 percent of these individuals were from the United States, while the rest were from Canada and Western Europe.
The researchers investigated how certain characteristics of a child are connected to the way their parents treat them. This information was collected through surveys, interviews, and at-home observations.
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The characteristics included factors like their birth order among their siblings, gender, temperament, and personality traits such as agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, which refers to the tendency to experience negative emotions.
Parents’ preferential treatment was measured by how they interacted with their children, how much money they spent on them, and how much control they exercised over them.
The study focused on correlations between child characteristics and differential parental treatment, so it is unable to prove why parents seem to favor daughters and more agreeable children.
It may be because agreeable children are more willing to do what they’re asked. Therefore, their parents have an easier time managing them and end up responding more positively toward them.
Moving forward, more research needs to be done in order to understand whether these preferences are present in families from other cultures.
The study was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
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