It’s the ultimate taboo as a parent (and one few will admit too), but now a new study has proven that a whopping 75 percent of parents favor one of their children over another.
It’s often suspected by feuding siblings that parents favour the other one more than you, much as this balance tends to change depending on who is behaving better at the present time.
And now a new study has proven that this might very well be the case.
According to a study from University of California researchers found that 74 per cent of mothers and 70 per cent of fathers confessed to liking one child more than another.
And while the parents did not specify which child was their favourite, when siblings were interviewed themselves, results showed younger brothers and sisters often sensed a bias towards the first-born, a fact that the younger children said has impacted on their self-esteem.
Professor Katherine Conger from the University of California said her team were trying to prove that first-borns felt hard done by compared with their other siblings, and asked pairs of teenage siblings no more than four years apart how they felt their parents treated them.
The findings, however, surprised the researchers a little.
Of the large-scale study of 384 families, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, it was the elder siblings who actually felt their accomplishments meant more to their parents – who were most likely experiencing exam or sporting success with a child for the first time.
” I was a little surprised,” Conger explains to the Daily Mail. “Our hypothesis was that older, earlier-born children would be more affected by perceptions of differential treatment due to their status as the older child in the family.”
What do YOU think? Was this the case in your family growing up? Let us know in the comments.
