When Your Mother Has a Favorite
How Parental Differential Treatment Affects Adult Children—and How to Heal From Being the Less-Favored One
There is a particular kind of childhood pain that can be difficult to explain in adulthood.
Your mother loves you—but she seems to love your sibling more.
She is warmer with them. More patient. More generous. She assumes the best of them while scrutinizing you. Their mistakes are understandable; yours become evidence of a character flaw.
Maybe you were the “difficult” child.
Maybe your sibling was the “easy” one.
Maybe you were the eldest daughter, and your mother seemed to become a better, calmer parent by the time your younger siblings arrived.
Whatever the configuration, you may eventually find yourself asking a question that feels almost embarrassing to say out loud:
Why does my mother treat my sibling better than she treats me?
Psychology has a name for this pattern: parental differential treatment (PDT).
And research suggests that its effects don't necessarily disappear when childhood ends.
What is parental differential treatment?
Parental differential treatment is when a parent consistently treats siblings differently in areas such as affection, support, discipline, conflict, privileges, or resources.
Not every difference between siblings is favoritism.
Children have different needs at different developmental stages. A toddler may require more supervision than a teenager. A child struggling with a disability may need additional support. A parent may respond differently to two children because their personalities or circumstances genuinely require different approaches.
The concern is persistent, meaningful differences in treatment that communicate unequal value or status within the family.
That distinction matters.
Parents do not have to treat every child identically.
But children need to experience themselves as equally worthy of love, care, and belonging.
What happens when a parent has a favorite child?
Research on parental differential treatment has found associations between perceived favoritism or disfavoritism and poorer psychological well-being, including greater depressive symptoms. These effects can persist into adulthood.
For young adults, research has also found that siblings who perceive themselves as receiving less parental support report more depressive symptoms, while greater differences in parental treatment are associated with lower sibling intimacy.
In other words:
The favorite child doesn't necessarily win.
And the less-favored child doesn't simply “get over it” when they move out.
The family hierarchy can follow both children into adulthood.
The less-favored child: “What's wrong with me?”
For the child who consistently receives less warmth, the psychological injury can become deeply personal.
Children don't have the developmental capacity to think:
My mother's parenting behavior may reflect her own history, stress, personality, mental health, or unresolved trauma.
Instead, children tend to ask:
What is wrong with me?
If your sibling is treated as lovable and you are treated as difficult, you may eventually conclude that you are difficult.
If your sibling's needs are accommodated while yours are criticized, you may learn that having needs makes you burdensome.
If your mother consistently assumes your sibling's intentions are good but yours are selfish, you may begin to distrust your own perception.
This is where core shame can develop: the persistent sense that there is something fundamentally wrong, defective, difficult, or unlovable about you.
And because the message comes from a parent, it can be remarkably difficult to recognize as a message rather than a fact.
What about the favored child?
It is tempting to assume that the favored child gets the better deal.
But favoritism can create problems for that child, too.
The favored child may feel responsible for maintaining their position.
They may learn that love is conditional on being successful, agreeable, emotionally easy, or compliant.
They may experience guilt about having privileges their sibling doesn't have.
They may become afraid that making a mistake will cause their parent's affection to disappear.
And they may feel trapped between loyalty to the parent and empathy for the sibling.
Research has found that parental differentiation can have negative consequences for both favored and disfavored children, and that sibling relationships can suffer when children perceive significant inequalities in parental treatment.
So the real loser in a family organized around favoritism is often the family system itself.
Favoritism can turn siblings into competitors
Children naturally compare themselves with their siblings.
Who gets more attention?
Who gets more freedom?
Who gets praised?
Who gets blamed?
Who gets the better bedroom?
Who does Mom call first?
Who does Dad confide in?
When those comparisons repeatedly produce the same answer, siblings can stop experiencing one another as teammates.
They become competitors for scarce parental resources.
And that competition can persist long after both children have become adults.
Research on young adult siblings found that greater parental differential treatment was associated with lower sibling intimacy, suggesting that unequal parental treatment can continue to shape sibling relationships during the transition into adulthood.
Other research has found that sibling tension can help explain part of the relationship between maternal differential treatment and depressive symptoms in adulthood.
This is one reason parental favoritism can be so destructive: the parent-child relationship doesn't contain the damage. It can spread through the sibling system.
Why might parents favor one child?
There isn't one explanation.
Family systems are complicated, and parental differential treatment can emerge for many reasons.
One possibility involves birth order and family roles.
The first child often arrives during a period when parents are learning how to parent for the first time. Parents may be more anxious, uncertain, exhausted, or overwhelmed.
By the time a second or third child arrives, they may have more confidence and experience.
That doesn't mean every parent favors younger children, or that birth order determines family relationships. But differences in parental experience can contribute to differences in how children experience the family environment.
There are also differences in children's personalities, needs, temperament, and behavior.
A parent may find one child easier to parent than another.
And that distinction becomes clinically important.
A child being harder to parent does not mean that child deserves less warmth.
The “difficult child” can become the family scapegoat
Sometimes a child is genuinely more emotionally intense, reactive, sensitive, anxious, oppositional, or demanding.
But family dynamics can create a feedback loop.
The parent becomes increasingly frustrated with the child's behavior.
The child senses the parent's frustration and becomes more dysregulated.
The parent interprets that dysregulation as further evidence that the child is “difficult.”
The child internalizes the label.
Eventually, everyone is responding not only to what the child is doing but to the identity the family has assigned to them.
She's dramatic.
He's sensitive.
She's the difficult one.
He's the easy child.
Once these identities become entrenched, behavior gets interpreted through them.
The same mistake made by two siblings can receive completely different responses because one child is presumed to have good intentions and the other is presumed to be problematic.
Why eldest daughters may experience this differently
The experience of parental differential treatment can be particularly complicated for eldest daughters.
Firstborn daughters may occupy a unique position in families: simultaneously a child and, sometimes, an informal helper, emotional support person, or model for younger siblings.
They may also have been born during a period when their mothers were experiencing the greatest uncertainty and adjustment to parenthood.
It would be an oversimplification to say that mothers inevitably favor younger children or that eldest daughters are destined to become the “unfavored” child.
They aren't.
But when a mother experiences her first child as intertwined with the stress, exhaustion, or identity disruption of early motherhood, that association can become meaningful within the parent-child relationship.
And sometimes the child becomes a living reminder of a period the parent would rather forget.
That is not the child's fault.
The complicated role of mothers and fathers
It is also important not to turn parental favoritism into a story about bad mothers.
Women have historically been blamed disproportionately for children's emotional outcomes while fathers' involvement in child-rearing has often been treated as supplementary rather than foundational.
A family system involves more than one parent.
When one parent consistently treats a child as less worthy while another parent enables, minimizes, or ignores the dynamic, both adults may contribute to the child's experience.
That does not mean every case of parental differential treatment involves two equally responsible parents.
It does mean that family dynamics should be examined systemically rather than automatically assigning responsibility to mothers alone.
What if your mother really did love your sibling more?
This may be one of the hardest questions for an adult child to sit with.
Because sometimes the answer isn't:
She loved you equally but expressed it differently.
Sometimes parents genuinely have preferences.
Research has documented parental differentiation in adulthood, including differences in emotional closeness, conflict, caregiving expectations, and support. Importantly, adult children's perceptions of these differences are themselves psychologically meaningful.
You don't necessarily need your mother to confess:
Yes. I favored your sister.
You may never receive that acknowledgment.
And healing cannot depend entirely on getting someone else to validate the reality of your childhood.
How do you recover from parental favoritism?
For the adult child who was consistently less favored, therapy is not about winning the competition retroactively.
It is about leaving the competition altogether.
The goal is differentiation: developing a stable sense of self that is no longer organized around earning approval from the parent who withheld it.
This can involve several therapeutic approaches.
Reparenting
Reparenting focuses on learning to provide yourself with emotional nurturance, validation, structure, and protection that may have been missing in childhood.
One of the questions I return to frequently in therapy is:
“What do I need right now?”
Not:
What would make my mother approve of me?
Not:
What would make my sibling respect me?
Not:
What do I need to do to finally prove that I am worthy?
What do I need?
Then the work becomes learning how to respond to that need.
Over time, the goal is to replace the critical or neglectful internalized parental voice with a steadier, more compassionate internal voice.
Eventually, you become the person who can provide yourself with safety.
DBT and the adult child who learned not to trust herself
For someone who grew up being repeatedly labeled “too much,” “dramatic,” “sensitive,” or “difficult,” Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) can also be useful.
DBT emphasizes validation, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness.
For an adult who was chronically invalidated, learning to recognize and validate their own emotional experience can be transformative.
The goal isn't:
“My feelings are always objectively correct.”
The goal is:
“My feelings are information. I can listen to them without allowing them to control me.”
That distinction can help restore trust in one's own internal experience.
Interpersonal effectiveness skills can also help when the adult child needs to establish boundaries with a parent or favored sibling.
You don't have to become the favorite
One of the most painful traps for the less-favored child is continuing to compete for the position they never had.
Maybe you become more successful.
More accomplished.
More agreeable.
More financially successful.
More available.
More helpful.
More impressive.
Maybe you become the child your mother always wanted.
And then, finally, she will choose you.
But what if she doesn't?
The work of recovery asks a much more difficult question:
What happens if I stop trying to win?
Because freedom may not come from finally becoming the favorite.
It may come from realizing that you don't need to be chosen by someone else in order to choose yourself.
You may have to be your own fairy godmother
Unfortunately, there isn't always a fairy godmother waiting to resolve the family system.
Cinderella's story gives us a satisfying ending because someone eventually recognizes her worth.
Real life is less cooperative.
Sometimes the parent never apologizes.
Sometimes the sibling never understands.
Sometimes the family insists that nothing happened.
Sometimes you remain the only person who fully understands what it felt like to grow up in that role.
Therapy can help—but the goal isn't necessarily to make the family finally see what you see.
It is to help you build a life that no longer depends on them seeing it.
Stop asking, “What's wrong with me?”
This is ultimately the shift I want for the adult child who grew up less favored.
From:
“Why wasn't I good enough?”
to:
“What happened to me?”
And eventually:
“How do I want to show up for myself now?”
Your mother's parenting may have shaped you.
It does not have to define you.
You may have learned to fawn, overachieve, disappear, perform, compete, or anticipate everyone's needs because those strategies helped you survive the emotional environment of your childhood.
You can learn something different.
You can develop boundaries.
You can grieve what you didn't receive.
You can stop auditioning for a role you never needed to play.
And you can build an internal relationship that is warmer, safer, and more reliable than the one you spent childhood trying to earn.
The goal isn't to become the favorite.
The goal is to become your own.
Frequently Asked Questions About Parental Favoritism
What is parental differential treatment?
Parental differential treatment (PDT) occurs when parents treat siblings differently in areas such as affection, support, discipline, conflict, privileges, or resources. Differences can be developmentally appropriate, but persistent disparities can affect children's well-being and sibling relationships.
Can parental favoritism affect adults?
Yes. Research has found associations between parental differential treatment and psychological distress, including depressive symptoms, among adult children. The effects can persist into midlife.
Does being the favored child cause problems too?
It can. Favoritism can create pressure to maintain a parent's approval, guilt about a sibling's treatment, and tension within sibling relationships. Research suggests that both favoritism and disfavoritism can be associated with family difficulties.
Why does parental favoritism damage sibling relationships?
When siblings perceive unequal parental treatment, they may begin comparing themselves and competing for affection, attention, or resources. Studies of young adults have linked greater parental differential treatment with lower sibling intimacy.
How can I heal from being the less-favored child?
Therapy can help adult children process childhood experiences, challenge internalized shame, develop boundaries, strengthen emotional regulation, and build a more compassionate relationship with themselves. Approaches may include reparenting-informed work, CBT, DBT, or other evidence-based therapies depending on the person's needs.
Do I need my parent to admit they favored my sibling before I can heal?
No. Parental acknowledgment can be meaningful, but recovery does not have to depend on receiving an apology or agreement from the parent. Therapy can help you validate your own experience, understand the family dynamics, and develop a sense of self that is less dependent on parental approval.
Is parental favoritism always intentional?
No. Parents may differentiate among children for many reasons, including differences in age, needs, temperament, health, family circumstances, or parental stress. The impact of the pattern can still matter even when the parent does not consciously intend to cause harm.
A note on the research: Parental differential treatment is a complex area of family research. Studies often distinguish between parents' actual reports of differential treatment and children's perceptions of being favored or disfavored, and those perspectives do not always match. The research therefore supports taking perceived favoritism seriously without assuming that every difference in parenting constitutes intentional favoritism.
References
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