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RESEARCHERS

The Science of Family Favoritism: What the Research Actually Shows

4 the researchers behind it — Most parents insist they love their children 'the same.' Decades of research on parental differential treatment — led largely by sociologist Jill Suit

Purdue University

J. Jill Suitor

Known for:The Within-Family Differences Study — a long-running research program on parental favoritism and its effects across adult siblings' lives

Key findings

  1. 2013

    With Gilligan, Kim, and Pillemer, studying 341 adult children in 137 later-life families, Suitor found a father's — but not a mother's — current favoritism predicted tension between adult siblings, especially among daughters. ↗

  2. 2013

    Tracking mothers' favoritism over time, Suitor and colleagues found it to be remarkably stable across years — a mother's 'favorite' rarely changes — meaning perceived favoritism is a durable feature of the family system, not a passing phase. ↗

  3. 2016

    Modeling data on 381 older mothers and their 1,421 adult children, Suitor and colleagues found that how similar a child's values are to the mother's — more than the child's achievements — was the strongest predictor of maternal favoritism and disfavoritism. ↗

Cornell University

Karl Pillemer

Known for:Research linking perceived parental differential treatment to depressive symptoms in adult children at midlife

Key findings

  1. 2010

    Adult children who perceived their mother as favoring a sibling, or as disfavoring themselves, reported more depressive symptoms in midlife — and the effect held for both the favored and the unfavored child, not only the child left out. ↗

  2. 2018

    Only about 15% of adult children in the study sample perceived that their mother treated all her children equally — differential treatment, whether favoring or disfavoring, was the norm rather than the exception in the families studied. ↗

Fordham University

Frances Fuchs Schachter

Known for:Originating sibling deidentification theory — how siblings exaggerate differences from each other to reduce rivalry

Key findings

  1. 1976

    Surveying undergraduates from two- and three-child families, deidentification — perceived and cultivated dissimilarity — was most pronounced between siblings adjacent in birth order and close in age. ↗

  2. 1978

    Cross-validating the 1976 self-report findings with mothers' judgments of young children (average age about 6.4 years), the study confirmed higher deidentification between adjacent sibling pairs, with levels stabilizing after early childhood. ↗

University of Leipzig

Julia M. Rohrer

Known for:Large-scale statistical tests that found birth order has little to no effect on personality

Key findings

  1. 2015

    Analyzing more than 20,000 people across three large national panels in Germany, the US and Britain, birth order showed no meaningful effect on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness or imagination, though firstborns showed a small advantage in measured and self-reported intellect. ↗

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