Some parents insist that they could never pick a favorite child — but a new study calls that into question.
A new analysis of 30 studies that collectively included almost 20,000 people revealed that parents are more likely to favor their daughters over their sons. The research also suggests that parents favored children who are perceived to be more agreeable and conscientious than their siblings. The studies included in the analysis were conducted only in North America and Western Europe, and they included predominantly white people, meaning that the results may not be applicable to people from other demographics.
In this context, favoring a child doesn't necessarily mean that parents have "favorites" — rather, they choose to treat certain children in a more favorable way than their siblings, the researchers noted in the study, which was published Jan. 16 in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
"It isn't about the parents loving one child and hating the other," said study co-author Alexander Jensen, 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, having more conflict with one of them, or spending more time with one of them," he told Live Science in an email.
It is important to understand these different parent-child interactions because children who receive more favorable treatment from their parents are more likely to have better mental health, increased academic success and healthier family relationships, among other benefits, previous research has shown. The opposite is true for children who receive less favorable treatment.
"A study several years ago suggested that if children understand why they are treated differently, then the differences don't matter," Jensen said. In other words, if a child sees that their treatment is justified, they may be more likely to accept it. For example, an older child may feel left out if their mom spends more time helping their younger sibling with their homework, until they realize that their sibling needs extra help with it.
"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," Jensen said.
In the new analysis, Jensen and colleagues looked at data from 30 scientific papers and 14 databases, which chronicled information on the family dynamics of 19,469 people. Around 67% of these individuals were from the U.S., while the rest were from Western Europe and Canada.
The researchers investigated how specific characteristics of a child correlated with how their parents treated them. This data had been collected in a variety of ways, including via interviews, surveys and at-home observations.
The children's characteristics included factors such as when they were born relative to their siblings, their gender, and their temperament and personality traits, such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism — the tendency to experience negative emotions. Parents' preferential treatment was measured by how parents interacted with their children, how much money they spent on them or how much control they wielded over them, in regards to having strict or lenient rules.
The study only looked at correlations between child characteristics and differential parental treatment. Therefore, the findings alone cannot explain why parents seem to favor daughters and more-agreeable children over sons and less-aggreeable children, respectively.
That said, agreeable children are likely to be more willing to do what they're asked, meaning that their parents may find it easier to manage them and thus respond more positively towards them, the study authors speculated.
In the future, more research is needed to understand whether these parental preferences also exist in families from a more diverse range of cultures, as well as across different stages of life — for instance, looking at parents' treatment of their kids in adulthood, too.
