As Philip Larkin once noted, your mum and dad have a lasting effect on you. Now, researchers have revealed which siblings in a family are more likely to be favoured: it is bad news for sons.
Researchers have found daughters, older children and those who are more conscientious or agreeable are likely to receive preferential treatment.
The authors of the study say the findings have important implications, adding that previous work has suggested differential treatment of siblings can have negative consequences for children’s development, especially for those who are less favoured.
“Parents and clinicians should be aware of which children in a family tend to be favoured as a way of recognising potentially damaging family patterns,” they write.
Writing in the journal Psychological Bulletin, Alexander Jensen and McKell Jorgensen-Wells from Brigham Young University in the US and Western University in Canada respectively, report how they analysed data from a host of sources – including 30 peer-reviewed journal articles – encompassing 19,469 different participants from the US, western Europe and Canada.
The pair considered the birth order of siblings, their self-reported gender, their temperaments and their personalities, and explored whether these were associated with various aspects of parental favouritism.
In most cases, the sources used only the children’s reports of parental favouritism, although some included reports from the parents.
When the researchers took into account whether the data had come from a peer-reviewed source, they found older siblings tended to be favoured by parents, at least when it came to areas of control, with such offspring tending to be given greater autonomy and be controlled less than their younger siblings.
Such differences, they note, could have important implications.
“A challenge that parents face is that differential control, regardless of whether it is developmentally appropriate or not, has been linked to lower self-worth and more problem behaviors among less favored siblings in both childhood and adolescence,” they write.
In addition, parents reported favouring daughters, although this was not noted by the children, with the authors noting this may suggest girls are easier to parent, on average.
The results also suggest conscientious children were slightly more favoured by parents, while a small bias was seen towards more agreeable children.
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However, the study has limitations, not least that the team were unable to take into account the role of perceived fairness around differences in parenting. In addition, further work is needed to explore whether the patterns suggested by the study are the same across different life stages.
The researchers add the sizes of the effects were small, noting “the reasons why parents treat their children differently are likely more complex and extend beyond the factors explored in this study”.
Laurie Kramer, a professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, cautioned that the data was collected in different ways among the different sources, and the analysis does not take into account potential shifts in cultural norms over decades.
But, she added, a key finding is that the characteristics and behaviours of the children themselves may influence parents’ attitudes. “The idea that children can make it more or less easy for parents to parent them is really important,” she said, although she noted further research should explore if parental preferences influence their children’s temperaments as well.
Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University, said the findings are enlightening, but he noted different children may be favoured for different things. “Parents do differentiate among their children, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they like or love one more than the other,” he said.
Pillemer added that his own work has found parents try hard not to show or act on their preferences. “The problems occur when nearly universal feelings of preference among children translate into treating them differently,” he said. “We can’t help how we feel, but we can definitely help how we act towards our children.”
