Ask a mother of grown children whether she has a favorite, and you will almost always get the same answer. She loves them all the same. She might add that they are different people, that she is close to each of them in different ways, that the very question is unfair. And she means it.
Then ask her something narrower. If she were ill and needed someone to step in, who would it be? When she has good news, whose number does she dial first? Which of her children does she argue with most? The answers come quickly, and they are rarely a tie.
That gap — between what mothers say about loving everyone equally and what they can name when the question gets specific — is one of the most consistent findings in the study of families in later life. And the children, it turns out, are often reading the situation more accurately than their mother thinks.
What the research actually measured
The clearest look at this comes from the Within-Family Differences Study, led by sociologists Karl Pillemer and J. Jill Suitor. Their team drew a sample of mothers aged 65 to 75 from town lists across twenty communities in the greater Boston area, interviewed them at length about each of their children separately, and then surveyed the adult children themselves — 671 sons and daughters, in their forties on average, across 275 families.
One set of findings was published in 2010 in the Journal of Marriage and Family, in a paper by Pillemer, Suitor, Seth Pardo, and Charles Henderson on mothers’ differentiation among their children and how it relates to those children’s well-being. “Differentiation” is the researchers’ careful word for what families call favoritism: treating or feeling differently about one child than another.
When the mothers were asked specific questions rather than general ones, most of them did differentiate. Seventy percent named a child they felt closest to. Seventy-nine percent named the child they thought most likely to care for them if they became ill or disabled. Seventy-three percent named the child they had the most conflict and disagreement with. Only a minority said, in each case, that they could not choose.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment. These were not strained or unusual families. They were ordinary mothers in their late sixties and seventies, most of whom would tell you, sincerely, that they have no favorite. Asked carefully, seven in ten could point to one child who occupies a particular place.
The children usually know
The more striking half of the finding is what the adult children perceived. Across the board, the children were substantially more likely to believe their mother had made a choice than the mothers’ own answers suggested.
On emotional closeness, only 15 percent of the children said they saw no favoritism in the family — while 30 percent of the mothers had declined to name a closest child. In other words, plenty of children sensed a pecking order in homes where the mother insisted there wasn’t one. The thing a parent works hardest to keep invisible is often the thing the children have been quietly tracking for decades.
This is the part that tends to land with readers who grew up in such families, and with parents who fear they have run one. The favorite is rarely announced. It lives in small asymmetries — who gets the longer phone call, whose troubles get the worried tone, whose name comes up first. Children are expert readers of exactly these signals, because as children their security once depended on reading them.
Why it matters, and how much
The study set out to learn something harder than whether mothers play favorites: whether it leaves a mark. It does, though the picture is more measured than a headline might suggest. Across all three domains the researchers examined — closeness, conflict, and expectations about caregiving — adult children reported more depressive symptoms when their mother differentiated among her children. Favoritism carries a practical edge into later life, too: nearly eight in ten of these mothers already had one child in mind as their most likely caregiver, an expectation that tends to settle on a single set of shoulders.
The effects were not uniform. The link between differentiation in closeness and depression was only marginally significant by conventional standards, while the links involving conflict and caregiving expectations were stronger. And for closeness in particular, it was the children’s own perception of favoritism, more than the mother’s private report, that tracked with how they felt. What a child believes about their standing in the family appears to matter at least as much as the standing itself.
We are writers and parents working through this research, not clinicians, and this is a reading of one careful study rather than a diagnosis of any particular family. The Within-Family Differences data are also correlational and gathered at a single point in time, which means they can show that favoritism and lower mood travel together, but cannot prove that one causes the other. A child who is struggling may read more favoritism into ordinary family life; a mother may feel less close to a child who has grown distant for reasons of their own. The arrow can point in more than one direction.
What this can and cannot tell you
It cannot tell you that your family is broken if your mother feels closer to your sister, or that you have failed as a parent because you would, if pressed, call one of your children first. Some degree of differentiation appears to be close to universal, and feeling differently about different people is not the same as treating them unjustly. There is also a difference between favoritism and unfairness. Children often seem better able to make peace with a parent’s honest preference than with one that is plainly felt and then flatly denied.
What the work can offer is a more honest frame. The goal that many parents set for themselves — to feel exactly the same about each child — may be neither achievable nor the right target. Children seem less wounded by a parent having human preferences than by the gap between what they sense and what they are told. Favoritism that is never named does not go unnoticed; it goes underground, where it is harder to talk about.
If these patterns describe a strain that is causing real distress — a grown child who carries a settled sense of being the lesser one, siblings who cannot be in a room together — that is the kind of long-running family hurt a family therapist or counselor is trained to help untangle. An article can describe the shape of the problem. It cannot do the work of repair.
The thing left unsaid
What the research keeps returning to is the silence, more than the favorites themselves. Anyone who has had a sibling already knows favorites exist; what stays unspoken is who they are. Mothers underreport it; children over-read it; and the distance between those two numbers is where a lot of quiet family ache lives.
The favorite child is rarely the family secret everyone imagines. The secret is that almost everyone already knows.
