According To Science, Parents Really Do Prefer Their First-Born Child To Their Siblings

Nov 21, 2018 by apost team

They may not admit it no matter how much you ask them. But chances are, your parents consider one child in the family to be their favorite. Don’t bother confronting them about it, though. They will deny as much as they can and tell you that they love you all the same.

Of course, you probably won’t believe it, as one child is scrubbing dishes in the sink while the other is dozing on the couch. When you see that happen, you’re bound to feel as though your other sibling is the favorite.

apost.com

No matter when you were born, you will always believe that your parents prefer the other sibling. If you are the oldest, you will think they favor the youngest. The youngest child will believe that the oldest is favored. No one ever believes that it is really them.

A detailed study was done in order to find out once and for all who is right.

This study involved 384 siblings, with none of them having more than a four-year age gap. Researchers conducted a series of questions to help gauge the one who received the favored treatment.

One question was geared towards how they felt their parents treated them. They were asked if they ever felt there was differential treatment when they were growing up. If the answer was yes, the participants were then asked if they believed this affected their confidence, while they were growing up and later on as an adult.

It wasn’t just the teenagers who were asked questions in the study. The parents of all the siblings were also questioned to determine how they really feel about their children. This research amounted to a staggering confession- parents really do have a favorite child. An amazing 70% of fathers and 74% of mothers confessed that they did have a favorite sibling.

However, the results were quite different when it came to the children.

The results concluded that younger siblings often felt as though their mother and father were biased when it came to the first-born child. This knocked down their self-esteem as they felt unable to keep up with their older sibling.

The older siblings reported that they had an inflated sense of self-confidence since they reached milestones before their siblings - such as driving, graduating from high school, and so forth. Because of this, they did feel as though they were superior to their sibling.

The elder siblings also acknowledged that they felt as though their parents preferred them over their siblings. They based this on the fact that they were the first ones to succeed in life. This research concluded that some siblings do realize that they are the ones that are being preferred.

This was a surprising result to a member of the University of California, Katherine Conger. Conger is the head of the research team who conducted the study on the siblings and parents.

She said that she and the other researchers were quite surprised by the results. She assumed that the first-born children of the family would feel more affected by their perceptions of differential treatment due to being the older sibling.

This was only one result of one specific study and doesn’t necessarily mean it is the case for every household. There are many circumstances that lead to one child being a favorite later on in life. Often, one sibling enjoys a better relationship with their parents while another has problems relating. You never know just how family dynamics are going to turn out.

The older sibling isn’t always guaranteed the spot of being the favorite child. However, being the one to first experience different milestones in life, it can also be argued that they may hold a stronger affiliation with one or more of their parents.

That doesn’t mean that mistakes don’t happen when parents raise their first-born child. Often, many mistakes occur because parents are brand new at raising a child. They don’t know exactly what they are doing, especially in some of the harder years of child-rearing. By the time the second sibling arrives, things have become much easier all around.

Sure, your parents may secretly prefer one sibling over the other. But you can’t let yourself dwell on this issue for too long. Your parents love you and nothing you can do will ever change that fact. You definitely do not want to let worry or anger get in the way of an amazing relationship with your parents.

Do you think this article is true? Were you the “favorite” growing up? Tell us about it in the comments and pass this along to your friends and family, they might find these results interesting, too!