Eighty percent of older mothers, when researchers sat them down and asked directly, admitted they had a child they felt closest to. Eighty percent of those mothers’ adult children, asked the same question from the other side of the table, said they’d always known their mother had a favorite. Nobody had to convince them. They’d simply known it for years, the way you know which chair in the living room is actually yours. That pairing of numbers, from a pilot study out of Cornell, is one of the plainer pieces of evidence that family favoritism isn’t a grudge invented by whichever sibling felt shortchanged at Thanksgiving. It’s something both sides of the relationship quietly clock, even while insisting out loud that it isn’t happening.
The researcher behind that early study, Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer, working with Louisiana State University’s Jill Suitor, interviewed 30 elderly mothers and 46 of their grown children. The children’s certainty that a favorite existed turned out to be far sturdier than their accuracy about who it was — they picked the right sibling only 41 percent of the time. That gap between “I know there’s a favorite” and “I know exactly which one” is the detail that makes the research interesting instead of just confirming what everyone already suspects. Adult siblings aren’t guessing. They’re responding to something real, even when the specific target of their guess is off.
Suitor spent the next two decades building on that finding. Her Within-Family Differences Study, a 20-year project funded by the National Institute on Aging and run out of Purdue with colleague Megan Gilligan, followed hundreds of later-life families and asked mothers pointed questions: which child are you closest to, which one are you proudest of, which one disappoints you, which one do you argue with most. The mothers answered. Consistently. In a 2015 analysis of 381 mothers reporting on 1,421 adult children, published in the Journals of Gerontology, 75.3 percent of mothers named a child they felt most emotionally close to, 74.3 percent named one they clashed with most, and well over half identified both a proudest child and a most disappointing one. These weren’t soft impressions. They were specific names, given on request, by women who in casual conversation would likely say they loved all their kids equally.
Why the Kids Always Know, Even When They’re Wrong
What the numbers suggest is that favoritism isn’t a single event a parent can hide or deny. It’s a pattern built from hundreds of small decisions — whose call gets returned first, whose advice gets taken, who gets asked to help move and who gets asked how the move is going. Children don’t need a parent to confess anything. They’ve been logging the pattern since childhood, and by adulthood the accumulated evidence is hard to argue with, even if any single data point could be explained away.
That’s also why the specific sibling named can be wrong so often while the underlying sense of favoritism is almost never wrong. A follow-up Purdue release on the same research noted that adult children guessing at a parent’s actual preference — say, who a mother would pick as her caregiver — got it wrong 60 percent of the time. People are watching for favoritism closely enough to feel certain it exists, but the signals they’re reading — warmth, attention, who gets called first — don’t map perfectly onto which sibling a parent would actually name if asked point-blank.
The consequences of that gap aren’t trivial. Suitor and Gilligan’s work has repeatedly tied perceived favoritism, in either direction, to worse relationships between siblings and higher rates of depression in the children who believe they landed on the losing end. A parent’s private ranking, real or only strongly suspected, follows children well into their own middle age.
None of this requires a villain. Most parents genuinely don’t set out to have a favorite, and most would deny it if asked plainly rather than through a research protocol built to surface it. But the data says something different is happening underneath the denial — a consistent, nameable pattern of closeness and distance that children have been reading correctly, in general if not always in specifics, their entire lives.
