Does parental favoritism still matter when the siblings are grown?

EQTiger Editorial · Sources checked 2026-10-26 · Expert review pending · More research, explained

Counting phone calls at forty-four

Dana is 44 and drives her mother to every cardiology appointment. Her brother Marcus lives four states away and calls on Sunday nights. When Marcus calls, their mother talks about it for two days. Dana has never said "you love him more" out loud, but she keeps a running tally, and so, it turns out, does Marcus: he thinks Dana is the one their mother trusts.

Most research on favoritism looks at young children. A smaller body of work asks what happens when the children are in their forties and the parent is in her seventies, and much of it comes from sociologists J. Jill Suitor, Karl Pillemer and their colleagues in the Within-Family Differences Study. Its design is unusual. Instead of surveying one adult child about their family, the team interviewed older mothers and then several of their grown children, so the researchers could compare what different people in the same family said about the same relationships.

Older mothers do tend to have a favorite, and keep the same one

Over seven years, the team followed 406 older mothers and asked about their relationships with 1,514 adult children (Jill Suitor and colleagues, 2013). Mothers tended to prefer the same children at both points, especially when asked which child they would want as a caregiver. Birth order, gender and other fixed traits were weak predictors of who held that spot. Two things predicted it well: how similar the child was to the mother, and how much support the child gave her. In other words, the favorite in later life is often the child who seems most like the parent and who shows up.

That has a sting for the Danas of the world, because showing up does not always win. When the team compared 675 adult children's guesses with what their mothers actually said, only 44.6% of the children correctly named the child their mother preferred as a future caregiver (Suitor and colleagues, 2019). Primary caregivers were less accurate than their siblings, and the explanation was uncomfortable: most mothers were being cared for by a child they had not chosen, and may not have said so to that child.

Grown children can tell there is a favorite, but often guess wrong about who

An earlier analysis of 769 mother and child pairs in 300 families checked how well adult children read their mothers' preferences for closeness and confiding (Suitor and colleagues, 2006). Children were generally right that their mother had a preferred child. They were often wrong about which child it was. Accuracy was higher when mother and child shared similar religious participation, and lower in larger families and among adult children who had children of their own.

Read that twice if you are sure you know the answer in your family. The feeling that someone is favored seems to be fairly reliable. The name you attach to it is less so.

Who tends to be favored, across many studies

A 2025 meta-analysis pooled data from 30 journal articles and dissertations plus 14 other datasets, covering 19,469 participants with an average age just under 20 (Jensen and Jorgensen-Wells, 2025). It looked for traits that predicted favored treatment.

Two limits matter here. The pooled samples were mostly children, teenagers and young adults, so the table describes families earlier in life than Dana's. And the daughter finding came from parents' own reports, which may not match what their children notice. The authors present these as tendencies across families, not a rule for any single one.

What favoritism does to the sibling relationship

This is where the evidence is most consistent. In 708 adult children from 274 families, believing that their mother currently favored one child, and remembering favoritism from childhood, both went with less closeness between siblings, regardless of which sibling had been favored (Suitor and colleagues, 2009). Remembered childhood favoritism was the stronger predictor of tension between siblings in midlife. A rivalry that started over who got the front seat can still be shaping who calls whom at 50.

Fathers matter too, possibly more than mothers in this one respect. In data from 341 adult children in 137 families, believing that their father currently favored any of the children predicted tension with siblings, while believing their mother did so did not, and the father effect was stronger for daughters (Gilligan and colleagues, 2013). That is one modest sample, so treat the mother-father contrast as a lead rather than a settled fact.

Younger adults show a similar pattern. In 151 pairs of siblings with an average age of about 24, the sibling who reported getting less support than the other reported more depressive symptoms, and bigger gaps in how parents treated the two went with less intimacy between them (Jensen and colleagues, 2013). In a national US sample of 1,470 sibling pairs, the sibling who had been closer to parents as a teenager went on to receive more money and practical help as a young adult, and unequal financial help predicted worse sibling relationships (Siennick, 2013). Money, in other words, is one of the ways old preferences turn into present-day resentment.

Most older siblings, it should be said, get along. In a sample of 608 adults averaging about 65 years old, people reported high warmth with their siblings and low levels of conflict and favoritism on average, though where favoritism was reported it went with more depression, anxiety and loneliness (Stocker and colleagues, 2020).

Being the favorite is not a prize

You might expect the favored child to come out ahead. The data say otherwise, at least some of the time. Using 671 mother and child pairs in 275 Boston-area families, the team found that when mothers differentiated among their children, in closeness, in who they expected to provide care and in conflict, adult children's depression scores were higher (Pillemer and colleagues, 2010). The pattern held across all three areas, with some differences depending on whether the mother's or the child's report was used.

A later wave with 725 adult children in 309 families made the point sharper (Suitor and colleagues, 2015). Depressive symptoms were higher for children who saw themselves as the one their mother felt closest to, as well as for those who saw themselves as the one she argued with most or was most disappointed in. The links were stronger in Black families than in White families. The authors' reading is that being singled out at all, in either direction, invites comparison with siblings and carries a weight of its own.

Not every analysis agrees on the favored child. In 746 adult children from 293 families, remembered favoritism from childhood and being the child a mother currently clashed with most predicted depressive symptoms, but being the child she currently felt closest to did not (Peng and colleagues, 2016). So the honest summary is that being disfavored carries a clear cost, and being the favorite carries a cost in some analyses and not in others.

When a parent's health fails, the old map comes back out

Favoritism tends to resurface at the worst possible time. In 450 adult children from 214 families whose mothers had needed care in the previous two years, both giving care and believing the mother favored a particular child as her future caregiver were linked to more tension between siblings, and the strain from caregiving was greater when those beliefs about favoritism were also present (Suitor and colleagues, 2014). A sibling who is already doing the driving, and who also suspects they are not the preferred one, is primed for a fight about who does what. The page on conflict between adult siblings covers that fight directly, and caring for an aging parent as a couple covers what it does to the caregiver's marriage.

What this research cannot tell you

• Most of it is one project. The Within-Family Differences Study is careful and long-running, but its families come mainly from one US region, and most of its findings concern mothers.
• It is correlational. A child who is already depressed may notice or remember more favoritism. None of these studies can show that favoritism caused the outcomes.
• Perception is the main measure. In the accuracy work, what children believed and what mothers reported often differed (Suitor and colleagues, 2006), and the effects on siblings run through belief.
• Fathers, stepfamilies and non-US families are thin. The father findings come from smaller subsamples, and the samples are mostly Black and White American families.
• No one has tested a fix. We could not find a trial showing that talking openly about favoritism improves adult sibling relationships. The suggestions below follow from the findings; they have not been tested.

Using the findings in your own family

Hold your guess about who is favored loosely. If your family resembles the ones studied, you are probably right that there is a pattern and quite possibly wrong about its direction (Suitor and colleagues, 2006). Before you confront a sibling, try the question Marcus never asked Dana:

Do you ever feel like Mom has a favorite? Because I always assumed it was you.

Talk about the parent's behavior as something you both deal with. Siblings who see favoritism as a shared problem have something to work on together; siblings who see it as the other one's fault have a grudge. Acknowledging how the other felt growing up does not mean agreeing with every memory, and validating a feeling without conceding the facts is a skill worth borrowing here.

I don't think either of us picked this. Can we stop keeping score against each other and figure out how to handle Mom together?

Ask your parent directly about care, before a crisis. The finding that fewer than half of adult children could name their mother's preferred caregiver points to one practical step: ask her, with siblings present or informed. The page on starting a hard conversation has openers for exactly that kind of talk.

Mom, if you needed help at home someday, who would you want to be in charge of it? I'd rather hear it from you now than guess later.

If you suspect you are the favorite, say so. Your silence about it can sting more than the parent's preference, because the preference was never yours to choose and the silence is. If the old rivalry runs hot, why small fights escalate explains how a remark about a phone call becomes a fight about 1994.

I know Dad leans on me more, and I know that's not fair to you. I'm not going to pretend I don't see it.

If what you carry is an old grievance against a parent or a sibling, what forgiveness studies measure, and where forgiving can cost you separates letting go of resentment from trusting someone again.

Make money visible. Because unequal financial help is one of the clearest predictors of strained sibling ties, unequal gifts or loans from parents are better discussed openly than discovered at a funeral. The family and in-laws guide covers how a partner can support you through these conversations without taking over.