Ask almost any mom which kid is her favorite, and she’ll tell you she doesn’t have one.
Her response is probably something along the lines of, “I love all my kids equally,” or “I could never pick a favorite.” And she might be telling the truth, to an extent.
But researchers at Purdue and Cornell decided to ask moms this question in a way that didn’t let them off the hook. The answers were more complicated than anyone expected.
The researchers didn’t ask mothers to pick a favorite, and they got a more interesting answer
Jill Suitor at Purdue University and Karl Pillemer at Cornell interviewed more than 400 older mothers about their relationships with over 1,500 adult children.
Instead of asking who the favorite was, they broke the question apart. Which child do you feel most emotionally close to? Which one are you proudest of? Which one do you have the most conflict with? Which one has disappointed you the most?
The goal was to pull those apart, because the researchers suspected they wouldn’t line up the way most families assume. And they didn’t.
About three-quarters of mothers named a child they felt especially close to, and around six in ten named one they were especially proud of. So mothers absolutely differentiated. But this wasn’t a secret ranking from one to four.
The kid she calls first when she’s upset may not be the same one she brags about to her friends. And the one she’d trust in a crisis might be a third person entirely.
The kids could tell favoritism existed, they just couldn’t tell who had it
When the team compared what mothers said with what their adult children believed, something odd came through. Mothers and kids agreed that the relationships weren’t equal. The children weren’t imagining it.
But they were wrong about who she favored. Most adult children overestimated how likely their mother was to name them as the closest one, and regardless of who they pointed to, they were usually off.
That’s the interesting part.
A family can spend years joking that everybody knows Josh is Mom’s favorite, and Mom might name a completely different child when asked privately. The family narrative and the mother’s experience are running on separate tracks, and nobody ever checks.
Part of the reason is that mothers tend to report greater closeness and fewer problems than their children do. The more conflict in a family, the wider that gap gets.
So a child who is certain Mom prefers their sibling may be reading tension that’s real but assigning it to the wrong source.
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There isn’t one all-purpose favorite, which is part of why everyone guesses wrong
The other reason kids get it wrong is that they’re searching for one winner. There usually isn’t one.
The studies found very little overlap between the different sides of favoritism. The kid Mom feels closest to is not necessarily the one she is proudest of, or the one she’d want caring for her if she got sick.
The idea of one all-purpose favorite rarely fits what families look like.
One kid shares her sense of humor. Another calls every Sunday. Another made choices she admires. Another is the person she’d trust to handle her finances if she couldn’t. All of those bonds are real, and none of them is the whole picture.
This is partly why the family argument about favoritism goes in circles. One sibling says Mom always liked you better, and the other says Are you kidding? She calls you every day. They’re both right, about different things.
The daily phone call is closeness. The bragging at the dinner party is pride. Those can belong to two different children at the same time, and often do.
What makes a mother feel closest to one child is usually not what anyone expects
Shared values turned out to be the strongest predictor. Not education, not career, not income or marriage. Whether the child saw the world the way the mother did mattered more than any conventional marker of success.
A broader review of the research added context: parents tended to show more warmth toward daughters, older siblings in some cases, and children who were more agreeable. But the patterns shifted depending on what kind of favoritism was being measured.
So favoritism often grows out of ordinary chemistry. One child sees the world more like Mom does. One calls more naturally. One is easier for her to talk to. The strongest bonds tend to form around fit, not achievement.
That chemistry has gotten more visible as political and religious differences within families have sharpened.
A mother who is deeply liberal and has one conservative child and one progressive child may feel closer to the one whose worldview matches hers. That closeness has nothing to do with effort.
The inaccuracy doesn’t make it harmless
None of this means the wrong guess doesn’t cost anything. What children believe about favoritism shapes how siblings treat each other, and the effects run well into adulthood.
Perceived favoritism has been linked with weaker bonds between siblings and greater tension in the family, even decades later. A mother can privately believe she has kept everything perfectly even while her children have built a completely different story about who was preferred.
The sister who drives two hours every weekend to help with groceries while her brother gets the proud mention at Christmas dinner isn’t imagining the imbalance. She’s living inside it. She may just be wrong about which side of it she’s on.
And being the favorite isn’t free. It can come with guilt, resentment from siblings, and an unspoken expectation that you’ll be the one who handles everything when the time comes.
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Nobody has the full picture
Having a different bond with each child is not the same as withholding love. A mother can feel closer to one kid and still love all of them without reservation. The research doesn’t say otherwise.
But maybe every sibling in a family is absolutely certain they know who the favorite is. The work behind these studies suggests they might want to hold that certainty a little more loosely.
Mom probably does have bonds that run easier, closer, or more naturally with certain children. But the one she’d privately name might not be the one everyone spent thirty years assuming had already won.
