Favoritism among Children by Mothers: Are Their Choices Always the Same?

Likenesses in personal values and beliefs between an adult child and their mother are what keeps that same child for being favored over the long-term, according to a recent study released Tuesday.

Researchers from the Perdue University who conducted the study found that a mother's preference for a particular child can have practical applications for their long-term care. The results of their study are published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Favoritism matters because it affects adult sibling relationships and caregiving patterns and outcomes for mothers, and now we know that who a mother favors is not likely to change," said Jill Suitor, professor of sociology, who has been involved in studying older parent relationships with adult children for nearly 30 years.

"Knowing that favoritism, particularly regarding caregiving, is relatively stable will be helpful for practitioners when designing arrangements that are going to work best for moms", she added. Roughly three quarters of the mothers involved in the study said that the child they favored as their preferred caregiver at the beginning of the study remained to be the same child after seven years.

"One of the biggest predictors of who remained the favorite was mother's perception of similarity between herself and her child," said Megan Gilligan, an assistant professor in human development and family studies at Iowa State University and a former Purdue graduate student who is a collaborator on the project.

"Mothers were likely to continue to prefer children who they perceived were similar to them in their beliefs and values, as well as to prefer children who had cared for them before." The researchers also found that gender similarity remained to be a consistent factor to show long-term favoritism, making mother-daughter bonds much stronger than other types of parent-child relationship.