Playing Favorites

Never mind what your parents told you. They had a favorite child — and if you have kids, so do you. Why it's hardwired into all of us

  • Share
  • Read Later
Photo-Illustration by Andrew Eccles for TIME

(2 of 5)

That kind of reductionist, bottom-line behavior is something we share with creatures throughout the animal kingdom. A crested-penguin mother will kick the smaller of her two eggs out of the nest, the better to focus on the presumably heartier chick in the bigger shell. A black-eagle mother will watch idly while her bigger chick rips her smaller one to ribbons. "The function of the second chick is insurance," says Douglas Mock, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma. "If the first chick is healthy, the policy is canceled." Humans may be a lot smarter than black eagles — and certainly more loving — but we're driven by the same evolutionary impulses, even if we're unaware of them.

The most conspicuous sign of fitness, of course, is physical appearance, and parents have a connoisseur's eye for what's appealing in a child. I was the second of four in an all-boy brood, and by almost any measure, the third in line, Garry, should have been the favorite, simply because he was gorgeous, born with extravagantly long eyelashes, absurdly perfect features and platinum blond hair that completed his found-in-a-cabbage-patch look.

There is not a parent on the planet who would admit to favoring a beautiful child over a less beautiful one, but scientists aren't constrained by the same pretense of impartiality. Long-standing bodies of work point to humans' deeply wired bias for the lovely over the less so — in the family, in the workplace and certainly in the dating market. It's part of what psychologist and sibling expert Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands in California calls the "general heuristic that things that are attractive are healthy and good and smart."

For all this, however, Garry wasn't the favorite. For my father, it was Steve, the oldest, a selection made mostly on the basis of primogeniture. That's not uncommon. Firstborns are often the family's favorite, and the reason is one corporations understand well: the rule of sunk costs. The more effort you've made developing a product, the more committed you are to seeing it come to fruition. "There's a kind of resource capital parents pour into firstborns," says Ben Dattner, a business consultant and organizational psychologist at New York University. "They build up a sort of equity in them."

And that equity often pays off. The oldest in most families have historically been the tallest and strongest, thanks to the fact that at the beginning of their lives, they don't have to share food stores with other kids. One 2007 Norwegian study similarly showed that firstborns have a 3-point IQ advantage over later siblings, partly a result of being the exclusive focus of their parents' attention in the earliest part of life. These benefits accrue like compounding interest. A small IQ advantage, for example, may yield a similar edge in SAT scores, which may tip a firstborn off the Harvard waiting list and into the entering class.

For my mother, none of this firstborn promise mattered. In her case, the favorite was Bruce, the youngest. That, in a way, was my father's doing too. Having had his fill with babymaking, our father wasn't enthusiastic about having a fourth child so soon after the third and expressed that antipathy toward Bruce in a number of ways — not least with an unpardonably free hand with corporal punishment, once administered when Bruce's only crime was crying in his crib or toddler bed before falling asleep. My mother matched my father's negative bias with a fiercely protective positive one, and when Bruce later acquired the last-born's signature gifts — a bright wit, a natural charisma and a perceptiveness that made him instinctively empathetic — the love match was set. (Last-borns develop such a suite of skills defensively: the ability to disarm and charm — what sibling psychologists call a low-power strategy — is an essential survival skill in a playroom in which you're the smallest.)

Favoring the most vulnerable child is a counterintuitive choice, at least in survival terms. Playing by black-eagle rules, my father's hostility toward my baby brother ought to have doomed him in my mother's eyes too. A child who's already being ill treated by one parent has hurdles to overcome just getting out of childhood in one piece, much less making it to a procreative adulthood. Best for a mom with years of child rearing ahead to cut her losses now.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5