Which Parent do You Love More?

 The one question no parent wants to hear answered

Showing favoritism toward one child in the family is a well-established no-no for parents. Whether they’re your own children or those of your partner in a blended family, you are told as soon as more than one child is in your family not to show preferences. Not only can parental favoritism lead children to become insecure and jealous during childhood, but its effects can carry over for decades.

Middle-aged children who report that their parents preferred one sibling in childhood continue to experience tension between themselves and the favored child.  Long-held jealousies don’t just fade away over time when they involve such powerful dynamics.

Turning the table now to preferences that children have toward parents, we find that this is an area in the family literature, potentially rife with all sorts of intriguing results, that simply doesn’t exist either in humans or other species.
There could be many reasons for children to prefer one parent over the other. A daughter may feel a closer identification to her mother (based on gender alone), but on the other hand, she may feel more conflict, particularly as the daughter develops through the complex years from the teens to adulthood. We know that some mother-daughter pairs experience a developmental schism (Birditt et al. 2009) in which they lose the ability to connect emotionally. On the other hand, adult fathers tend to have more ambivalent feelings toward their children than do mothers according to research by Cornell University’s Karl Pillemer and associates (2012).
There are many possible factors that could affect children’s preferences toward parents in addition to gender per se. Children may feel that one parent is more similar to them psychologically, is more empathetic to them, or is just a better parent period. We could also make the case, in contrast, that children prefer the parent who is opposite to them, just as in adult romantic relationships where “opposites attract.”
From a psychodynamic perspective, of course, your preference for your mother or father becomes one of the great dramas of childhood. When you’re in the throes of the Oedipal conflict, you should be deeply in love with your opposite-sex parent but, as the conflict is resolved, you begin to identify more and more with the other parent.  This is a simplified rendition of the theory but, if we accept the basic premise, it does imply that adult daughters should always prefer their mothers, and sons their fathers. Anyone who doesn’t show this normative pattern, this theory would imply, hasn’t “worked through” the conflict and is forever destined to be neurotic.
Behavioral theory, by contrast, would argue that children prefer the parent who provides them with more positive reinforcement.  Perhaps like those European roller birds, you gravitate toward the parent who will ensure that you get the food you need.  
A 2013 study on Portugese and native mother-daughter pairs carried out by University of Luxembourg’s Isabelle Albert and colleagues suggests, instead, that by the time children grow to adulthood, they bond with the parent who they see as more likely them ideologically.
Albert and her team based their study on the Bengston and Roberts (1991) well-accepted Intergenerational Solidarity Model, which proposes that running through all family relationships among multiple generations are a set of basic underlying dimensions. First is the affection dimension, or the extent to which parents and children like and love each other. However, potentially just as important are the dimensions of  values consensus, or how much they agree on a basic philosophy of life, functional, or how much they support each other, and normative, or how much they feel they should behave toward each other based on their parent-child social status.
Using this framework, if you feel that you prefer one parent to another, you can ask yourself whether it’s because you and this parent see the world in similar ways, both like and love each other, because this parent supports you more, or whether you just think that you “should.”
The findings of the Albert et al. study suggest that values consensus plays a major role in determining the feelings a daughter has toward her mother and how much she’s willing to support her.  Conversely, mothers who felt close to their daughters did so regardless of whether they agreed in life philosophy. These findings support the notion of the intergenerational stake—that parents look less critically at their children than children do to their parents.  
Because there were no men in the study, the possible combinations of mother-son, father-son, and father-daughter obviously couldn’t be examined. However, we might wonder whether values trumps gender when a child, regardless of gender, thinks about the preferred parent. Particularly with changing gender roles, the stereotyped notion of the mother providing the affection and the father providing the discipline, for example, may be starting to shift.
Preferring one parent over the other raises a number of complications in the family while the children are growing up, but perhaps has more serious implications over time. Missing out on the relationship you have with an aging mother and father by virtue of expressing a preference for the other may close off one route to fulfillment and self-understanding as both you—and your parents—grow older.



Original Article by : Susan Krauss Whitbourne Ph.D. in Fulfillment at Any Age