The Sibling Effect

Families are often compared to palace courts, and that’s as fair an analogy as any: There’s an unmistakable king and queen, there’s a collection of princes and princesses, there is competition and intrigue among that younger generation worthy of the czars and the Windsors. Comparisons to the animal kingdom work, too—with the tooth-and-claw battle for resources among the young and the life-anddeath struggle for genetic advantage. But the best analogy may be to a corporation. It’s not just the top-down command structure that makes the parallels so apt, or the constant jostling to win the favor of the boss man or boss woman in the corner office. It’s the way those chiefs often play favorites with the tribe. The family has its birth-order hierarchy, just as an office has its organizational chart and seniority rules. But in both venues, there’s often one subordinate who somehow sidesteps that structure and, through a mixture of charm, charisma, or a thousand other qualities, becomes the best beloved among what is supposed to be a team of equals.

By almost any measure, Garry should have been the favorite in my family. For one thing, he was gorgeous. With his fine and symmetrical features, he seemed oddly too beautiful to be a boy—an observation the obstetrician made the moment he saw him. “A waste,” he clucked, only half-jokingly. When Garry’s first, feathery crop of hair grew in, it was not Steve’s and my sawdust brown or Bruce’s fiery red but a bright platinum blond—wholly suited to his fanciful, found-in-a-cabbagepatch look.

There is not a parent on the planet who would admit to favoring a beautiful child over one less beautiful, but scientists aren’t constrained by the same pretense of impartiality, and long-standing bodies of work point to the human species’ deeply wired bias for the lovely over the less so—at home, in the workplace, and certainly in the dating market. It’s something we all know intuitively and goes back to what psychologist Catherine Salmon calls the “general heuristic that things that are attractive are healthy and good and smart.”

But Garry had more than his looks going for him. He was a serenely agreeable child—one who, even as a newborn, seemed to cry only when it was strictly necessary and to quiet down as soon as his immediate needs were met. As we were growing up, he quickly became my favorite playmate, in part due to his fertile imagination—an imagination he was perfectly content to explore by himself. In his hands, an empty soda bottle—plus a little tap water and a drop of red food coloring—became a potion or a poison or whatever else suited his fantasy play. The rest of us would watch him as he got lost in the narrative he’d invented and then go scurrying for empty soda bottles of our own, which never quite had the magic Garry found in his. When it suited him, he’d invite us into his game, and there we’d find the fun.

For all this, however, Garry wasn’t the favorite. For my father, it was Steve—a selection made mostly on the basis of primogeniture. “Heir apparent” was the term my father used, and while I didn’t know what it meant, I was pretty sure it didn’t apply to me. For my mother, the favorite was Bruce—and that, in a way, was my father’s doing, too. Before Bruce came along, my father had had it with baby making, and hadn’t planned on adding another child after three so close in age. He learned that a fourth was on the way when Garry, the third, was only four months old. When Bruce did arrive, my father made his new son’s accidental station clear in the most primal way he could—which for him meant an even freer hand with corporal punishment, on at least one occasion administered when Bruce’s crime was little more than crying in his crib or toddler bed before going to sleep. When a criminally reckless babysitter gave Bruce a slug of the prescription drug phenobarbital to get him to go to sleep one night—knocking him out for a day and a half—my father acceded to my mother’s demands to fire the woman, but only grudgingly.

My mother matched my father’s negative bias toward Bruce with a fiercely protective positive one, and when Bruce later acquired the last-born’s signature gifts—a bright wit, a natural charm, and a sharp theory of mind that made him innately empathic—the love match was set. When my parents split up and my father left the house, the special attention he had paid to Steve left with him, and Bruce assumed the favored role alone.

My parents were hardly unique in having a favorite offspring. Indeed, what would have made them remarkable would be if they hadn’t. It’s one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that every parent has a preferred son or daughter—and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids stay mum about their status—the better to preserve the good thing they’ve got going. The unfavored kids howl about it like wounded cats. And on pain of death, the parents insist that none of it is true. The larger the family, the more acute the problem—simply because there are more aggrieved children. In a two-child home, there’s a good chance the parents will split their preference, and while the firstborn may forever nag Dad to admit that the baby was his favorite and the second-born may resent Mom because she favored the oldest, both at least know what it is to be someone’s number one. But simple arithmetic means that in a three-, four-, or five-child family, there will be at least one, two, or three who will always feel like a second choice.

Study after study has illustrated this point, and the numbers they’ve produced are compelling. Katherine Conger, at the University of California, Davis, assembled a group of 384 adolescent sibling pairs and their parents, visiting them three times over three years. During those sessions, she questioned them all about their relationships with the other family members and interviewed the kids alone about their sense of well-being. To see how the family interacted as a group, she also videotaped them as they worked through sample conflicts. Overall, she concluded that 65 percent of mothers and 70 percent of fathers exhibited a preference for one child—in most cases, the older one. What’s more, the kids were aware of exactly what was going on and, in Conger’s study at least, accepted it with surprising equanimity. Typically, they would look for a reason for the parental preference—the gender or age or temperament of the favorite child—and simply choose to live with that reality. Reports Conger: “They all say, ‘Well, it makes sense that they would treat us differently.’ ”

But just because favoritism is everywhere doesn’t mean it’s as easy to understand as it seems, or that there are universal truths about which kids will be tapped as the best loved. The father-son bond is the stuff of legend—unless it’s the father-daughter one that’s the rule in your family. A mother innately understands her daughters—unless the girls turn out be an utter mystery to her and she adores one of her boys best. Being the unfavored child can be a blow to a child’s ego, while being the favored one breeds confidence and self-esteem—unless it’s the other way around. No matter what, kids who do suffer for their status—favored or unfavored—will remember it for a lifetime.

“My mom didn’t like my older sister and did like me,” says Roseann Henry, a magazine and website editor and now the married mother of two girls. “Everyone assumed I had it great, except that my sister tortured me pretty much all the time—and really, what affects daily life more for a kid: the approval of a parent or the day-to-day torment of an older sister? Personally, I can’t remember a single instance of my mother’s theoretical approval, but I could repeat word for word some of the fat jokes I got from my sister forty years ago. Now excuse me,” she adds, presumably joking, “I have to go get a Krispy Kreme.”

Henry is hardly the only adult who’s found favoritism a mixed bag of perks and punishment, guilt and rewards, nor is she the first to find that the memories of those experiences don’t simply go away. If the parental habit of assigning different values to different children in a single brood can cause such pain, it’s a wonder it ever became such a firmly established part of human nature.

As with so much else, the favoritism impulse begins with the parents’ own survival needs—the biologically narcissistic act of trying to replicate themselves through succeeding generations and thus ensure that they live on even after their technical death. This impels Mom and Dad to tilt in favor of their biggest, healthiest, prettiest offspring on the theory that those kids will be more reproductively successful than others. Whether we want to admit it or not, that is the same kind of reductionist, bottom-line strategizing that drives the crested penguin to kick her smaller egg out of the nest and the black eagle mother to watch idly while her bigger chick rips her smaller one to ribbons.

Humans, however, do bring more to the game. Under black eagle rules, for example, the very fact of my father’s antipathy for 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 and focus on her other chicks. Yet not only did my mother not push Bruce aside, she gathered him closest of all.

Compassion—a feature not wholly unique to humans but seen a lot more commonly among our species than among any other—was clearly at work here. But so were some practices we do share with nonhuman species. In her elegant book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy cites work conducted with coots, a species of black-and-white waterbird common in Europe and the Americas. Unlike other birds, coots don’t pour most of their parenting efforts into their strongest chicks but rather play a different probability game, spreading the care and the goodies around in the hope of maximizing the raw number of offspring that survive. This can mean not just remembering to treat the youngest and weakest of your offspring equally but favoring them, since they’re the ones that need the most help.

In case the mothers forget which chick is the youngest (coots do all look remarkably alike), nature provides an unmistakable cue in the form of a bit of fancy red plumage on the babies’ heads. Newly hatched birds don’t have the colorful tuft for long, but for the period they do have it, they become irresistible. Mothers with a nest full of babies will deliberately steer extra food to the reddest head in the bunch, reckoning that that chick needs the most care. It is surely just a coincidence that Bruce, the baby in our nest, was a redhead, too, but my mother’s protectiveness of him was not that different from the mama coot’s, both in terms of her instinct to provide special care and in the way Bruce’s cuteness encouraged that impulse. The chapter in Hrdy’s book that deals with the coot is called “Why Be Adorable?” and the behavior of both human and animal moms answers that question neatly.

There is, however, another, much darker side to parental favoritism, and Hrdy reports on studies that powerfully document that as well. The late William Skinner, a University of California anthropologist, specialized in research on Chinese and Japanese cultures, and was particularly struck by parenting practices during feudal Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate, from 1603 to 1868. Like many other cultures, the Tokugawa Japanese had a strong preference for male heirs, prizing their long reproductive potential and the leadership roles they could be counted on to assume in the extended family. A child who was not just a son but a firstborn son ought thus to have been of special value. Yet when many Japanese hit the procreative jackpot this way, they’d do something unexpected to that eldest boy: They’d kill him. The family’s goal was not so much to have a firstborn male as to have the fittest possible male. Paradoxically, that meant hoping for a daughter first, someone who, as Hrdy says, would become “a handy little allomother who could help her parents rear their primary heir so he could grow up to be a model son.” So culturally valued was this daughter-first-son-second—or ichihime nitaro—model that few people worried much about the infanticide that it sometimes made necessary.

The ichihime nitaro tradition was, surely, the most extreme example of favoritism imaginable: Few sibs would rank lower in a family’s hierarchy than the girl raised to serve her younger brother or the boy killed at birth to make such an arrangement possible. And few would rank higher than the son for whom the killing was done and the sister was conceived in the first place. Still, the extremes of the feudal East do bracket the practices of the modern West, and we are susceptible to some of the same biases that drove ichihime nitaro, particularly when those biases are based on gender.

The oft-seen pattern of parents with cross-gender preferences in their kids—the dad who’s all but helpless in the face of his daughter’s charms, or the mom who adores her eldest son—is one very good example. Such favoritism patterns hardly exist in every family, but they’re more common than we may think, as Salmon discovered in a 2003 study published in the journal Human Nature. “I asked subjects to list which child in the family was their mother and father’s favorite,” she says. “Overall, the most likely candidate for the mother’s favorite was the firstborn son and for the father, it was the lastborn daughter. You would think fathers would favor their sons—they certainly do a lot of things with them, like play sports and video games—but in terms of things like emotional closeness, there is a tendency for them to dote on their little princess. Meanwhile, mothers tend to dote on their firstborn sons.”

Studies that have dug deeper into this preference have found that what parents find most appealing about their opposite-sex favorites is often different from what we’d expect. It’s not just the frilliness of a little girl that appeals to Dad, or the uncomplicated love that can come from a boy that delights Mom—though these stereotypes are frequently part of it. And while Freudians would raise the Oedipal specter—with a dark sexual subtext running beneath cross-gender preference—modern studies have marginalized that factor, though it sometimes does play some role. Instead, what parents seem to value most in their opposite-sex children are the traits that, paradoxically, are associated with their own sex—the sensitive mom who goes gooey over her son the poet, or the hard-knocks dad who adores his tough-as-nails daughter. Narcissism, again, may play a role in this. It’s not always easy for a father to see himself replicated in a daughter or a mother to see herself in a son. But if the kids can’t look exactly like you, they can at least act like you—and you’ll love them more when they do.

Gender can be an especially powerful variable in determining favoritism in three-child families. As a rule, first- and last-born children have a better shot of being at least one parent’s favorite than middle kids do. In all-boy or all-girl families this is especially so, since the middle child stands out neither by birth order nor sex. That’s also the case in families in which the gender sequence is, say, boy-boy-girl or boy-girl-girl, since the middle child is still not unique. Shifting the sequence slightly, however—to boy-girl-boy or girl-boy-girl—may change everything. In these cases, the uniqueness of gender may trump the usual appeal of the oldest or youngest, and at least one parent may favor the middle sib.

“If you have a child who is different for any reason—especially being the only girl or only boy,” says Salmon, “that child is going to get extra attention and investment. This takes away from the negative aspects of being in that disadvantaged birth-order position.”

My wife, Alejandra—the middle child between two brothers and in many ways the de facto oldest—is a very good example of this phenomenon at work. Born in Mexico, the three sibs were raised largely by their divorced mother, who was (and still is) the costume director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City—essentially Mexico’s Kennedy Center or Metropolitan Opera. The kids would often go straight from school to the theater, where they would settle into the red velvet audience seats to do their homework while waiting for their mother to finish her workday. The boys showed little interest in the costuming arts, but after a childhood spent watching the great ballets and operas take shape, my wife did—and grew far closer to her mom in the process. Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, she also became something of a mother pro tem, looking after her little brother when no adult was around, and serving as a conduit to her older and more private big brother. It may be too much to say she was the favorite—Mexico, more so than the United States, remains a patriarchal place, and an oldest son is still a thing to be highly prized—but as the sole girl, she was and remains the one with the closest and easiest ties to her mother.

Whichever child becomes the favorite, once the patterns are established, they’re awfully hard to break. There are not many kids who spend their first ten years as Mom’s or Dad’s best-loved child and then fall to second place, though adolescence can sorely test even the strongest parent-child bonds. Still, favoritism does have some flexibility to it, depending on what are known as family domains—the different venues or situations in which family members operate. And those venues are numerous. There’s what happens inside the home and what happens outside it, what happens at the dinner table or on the soccer field, on vacation or in the living room, and the shifting locales can lead to shifting preferences. The ex-jock dad who favors his athletic son may be driven to distraction by the boy’s restless energy when it comes time to read a book or simply have a conversation. When Dad is looking for thoughtful parent-child bonding he may thus turn to his daughter. Over the long course of an entire childhood, the son may still come out on top, but the daughter will get enough emotional nourishment that the overall disparity may not wind up being terribly significant to her.

“Large-scale favoritism patterns are pretty stable,” says Corinna Jenkins Tucker, an associate professor of family studies at the University of New Hampshire. “But there are definite differences by domain. Maybe Mom gave a son more love, but she spent more time playing games or reading books with her daughter. That winds up being okay for children. It becomes a problem when there is a child who isn’t favored in any area at all.”

Children themselves are not passive players in the favoritism sweepstakes—and they often fight ferociously to change the existing arrangement. The Kennedy family, again, is a case study in how this plays out. Joe Sr., the patriarch of the clan, was often away from home, but when he was around, he took the opportunity to remind all of the kids that they were expected to compete aggressively with one another in all things—particularly sailing and other athletic pursuits. He made it clear they were in the game not for the fun but for the victory, and Kennedy kids who were found wanting in their effort were made to eat in the kitchen.

What made things harder for most of the kids was that Rose, the mom of the brood, openly favored Joe Jr., the oldest child. John, the second boy, was willowy and even frail compared to his big brother. According to The Kennedy Obsession, a 1997 book by John Hellmann, Rose referred to JFK as “impish”—which is not how you want to be seen when you’re battling for approval and dominance. John forever hurled himself into competition with Joe—fueled in equal measures by desperation and resentment. The two once engaged in a bicycle race in opposite directions around the house. Predictably, they collided—and predictably, John came out the worse, winding up with twenty-eight stitches. Joe Jr. walked away unhurt.

Kids growing up in less of a familial pressure cooker generally find other ways to balance the favoritism scales a bit. You can’t do much about your gender or your birth order, but you can learn to make the most out of the niche you’ve got. The non-favored daughter who talks film with her movie-loving mother may have come by her own love of the cinema naturally—or she may have come by it strategically, knowing that that was one way to win some extra maternal attention. The same may be true of the son who learns to like watching football even if he’s not naturally drawn to it, reckoning this will net him some bonding time with his father on Sundays, despite the fact that the rest of the week Dad clearly favors his daughter. In this sense, kids are a bit like tree leaves, sorting themselves out so that they grow in a shaft of light not blocked by the leaf above.

“Siblings are devilishly clever,” says Frank Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley. “Much smarter than psychologists. They figure out every way to compete within the family. They are constantly trying to fine-tune their niche to squeeze the maximum benefits out of their parents.”

Sons and daughters learn to game the system on a more day-to-day basis, too, flipping blatant favoritism to the shared advantage of all the sibs. In these cases, the favored child may be a willing accomplice, agreeing to ask for favors from Mom or Dad that a less loved sib could never manage. “They’ll say to one another, ‘Why don’t you ask Mom if we can go to the mall because she never says no to you,’” says Conger.

While all the sibs can reap small-scale benefits from such ploys, the larger issue for psychologists—to say nothing of parents themselves—is what the long-term damage of favoritism may be. Can you go through your entire childhood looking enviously at the crowned prince or princess across the dinner table and not begin to wonder if perhaps you’re somehow less worthy? Do you carry that uncertainty with you even when you’ve moved into the larger world in which confidence and selfworth are critical to getting ahead? And what about the favored sibs themselves? Do they arrive at adulthood with a sturdy ego and a happy sense of their own value? Or are there hidden downsides to being the golden child, ones that don’t seem evident when the prizes are being bestowed but slowly reveal themselves outside the home—and exact their own price?

Not all psychologists agree on just what the impact of favoritism is, but as a rule their advice to parents is simple: If you absolutely have to have a favorite—and you probably do—you’re right to try to keep it to yourself. Psychologist Victoria Bedford of the University of Indianapolis has studied favoritism extensively, looking at the impact of what she calls LFS (least favored status) on children’s relationships with other family members, self-esteem maintenance, socialization, and later functioning in the world. No matter how she broke down her data, it all told her the same thing. “My main conclusion was how horrible favoritism is on siblings,” she says flatly—and sibs themselves often agree.

Charles Dickens wrote painfully—and, of course, poignantly—about his own LFS experiences. His childhood dream, as he described it in autobiographical essays, was to grow up to be a “learned and distinguished man,” and he was devastated when it seemed he’d never get the chance. His parents had enough money to pay for schooling, but not for both him and his older sister, Frances. They made what was, in the nineteenth century, the uncommon choice of educating the girl in the family, sending her to the Royal School of Music. Charles went to work in a bootblacking factory. Hard as that was for him, the most acutely painful part of the experience occurred when he was required to attend a ceremony at which his sister was presented a scholar’s medal for her fine academic work.

“I could not bear to think of myself,” Dickens recalled, “beyond the reach of all such honourable emulation and success. The tears ran down my face.” Even as a highly celebrated adult, he never fully got past the experience. “My whole nature was so penetrated by the grief and humiliation of such considerations that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I . . . wander desolate back to that time in my life.”

Sulloway, who covers Dickens in detail in his book Born to Rebel, writes about those observations: “This autobiographical fragment forms the basis for David Copperfield, which Dickens once described as ‘a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction.’ For Dickens, the response to being abandoned by his parents was to become obsessed by the problem and its diverse remedies.”

(Dickens, to his credit, bore his disappointment and resentment over his upbringing with grace, and did not allow it to affect his love for Frances. She married and later had a physically disabled son, who became the model for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. Frances died of consumption in 1848, at age thirty-eight. Shortly before her death, Dickens visited her at her sickbed. He was struck by the courage and strength she exhibited as she faced death and that night wrote to his friend, the essayist and historian John Forster, about the experience: “I asked her very often, if she could ever recall anything that she could leave to my doing, to put it down, or mention it to somebody if I was not there; and she said she would, but she firmly believed that there was nothing—nothing. Such an affecting exhibition of strength and tenderness, in all that early decay, is quite indescribable. I need not tell you how it moved me. I don’t know why I write this before going to bed. I only know that in the very pity and grief of my heart, I feel as if it were doing something.”)

Favoritism dramas play out among sibs who don’t achieve Dickensian fame. Bob Strozier, a writer born in Georgia in 1940, was the oldest sib in a three-child family that included a younger sister and brother. Unlike many firstborns, he was not the best loved—and he learned it early and painfully. “When my younger brother, Chuck, was a teenager, I was wildly jealous because he was a football player and had girlfriends and was the apple of my father’s eye—all the things I thought I should be,” he says. “At first I thought I was measuring up on all counts, but then I gradually felt I wasn’t. And the more my stock seemed to fall, the more Chuck’s rose.”

Even before the brothers’ teen years, Strozier had the sense that he was being displaced, and found creative ways to express it. When his younger brother contracted ringworm at age five, he received the then-accepted treatment, which was radiation to the scalp. Not surprisingly, that would kill the parasite—and also cause the patient’s hair to fall out. “I used to sit with him in my lap and pull clumps of his hair out,” recalls Strozier. “Then I told him I’d found a hole in his head and that it would have to be filled with hot lead.” He adds: “We’re still speaking.”

Clare Stocker, a research professor in developmental psychology at the University of Denver, has amassed evidence showing that unfavored children may turn their disappointment not only outward, in the form of aggression toward the first-tier brother or sister, but inward, in the form of privately suffered emotional turmoil. She studied 136 sibling pairs from one western U.S. city and its suburbs (leaving the city unnamed in her paper to encourage subjects to participate and to be candid), then returned to observe them again two years later, and once more two years after that. Over that period, she found that kids who felt less loved than other siblings were more likely to develop anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression. Unable to understand those feelings, much less cope with them effectively, some of the subjects would begin exhibiting behavioral problems. That would lead parents to crack down on them, only widening the apparent gap between the kind of treatment Mom and Dad were meting out to them and the kind being lavished on the favored child.

None of this is good for the unfavored sibs, but it’s the low-self-esteem piece that worries some psychologists most. Children learn lifetime lessons about their own value almost from the moment they’re old enough to understand a parent’s tone of voice, which is one of the reasons even the most frustrated moms and dads are so often reminded that while it’s all right to express anger, exasperation, and disappointment to a child, they should carefully avoid such demeaning expressions of emotion as contempt, disdain, or disgust. Most parents do manage to stay away from using such heavy emotional cudgels, but subtler, less voluntary slights are harder to eliminate entirely. There are, however, ways to compensate for them.

Patricia East, herself an identical twin and now a developmental psychologist and researcher in the department of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, stresses that parents’ goal should not be to treat all of their kids identically. That’s not only impossible, it’s unwise, since every child has a particular temperament and set of qualities that have to be dealt with in particular ways. Rather, the objective should be differential but fair treatment that, East says, plays well to kids’ “unique qualities, their emotional optimism, their happiness. It would be ideal if parents recognized these things and then parented according to the individual child’s aptitudes and personality.”

Even without thinking about it much, parents are often very good at doing just what East recommends—signing the artistic child up for a drawing class, enrolling the athletic child in soccer camp. Similar attention to particular strengths can be paid around the home. It may be impossible not to get frustrated at the child who is not a natural student and is forever trying to dodge homework, but it’s not impossible to balance that with applause for the same child’s woodworking gifts or fashion sense. Harvard may not be in the future, but a carpentry business or design school could be.

The manifold damage that can be done to an unfavored child throughout the long slog of childhood is easy enough to imagine and understand. Harder to fathom are the ways the best-loved son or daughter can suffer, but they’re very real as well—and they go far deeper than merely the resentment a first-tier child such as Roseann Henry felt from her second-tier sister. The biggest risk may be that when you spend your early life enjoying the huzzahs of your parents, you may be entirely unprepared for a larger society in which the family hierarchy and value system don’t apply and you’re just one college student or young adult out of many. There’s nothing wrong with a puffed-up child learning a little humility—indeed, it may be essential to social and professional success. But what happens when favored kids don’t learn it? What happens when an outsized ego resists being brought down to size?

The story of the family prince struggling with adulthood is a repeated theme in both drama and history. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about more than the tragedy of its lead character, Willy Loman, as he loses both his livelihood and his dignity. It’s also about the crisis of his sons—particularly Biff, the older of the two—who grew up on a steady diet of paternal praise, only to find that others play by very different rules, expecting laurels to be earned before they’re bestowed. When, as an adult, Biff at last learns the hard truth, he blames not himself for his failure to achieve what he’d dreamed of achieving but his father, for making him temperamentally ill equipped to do so.

George W. Bush also bumped up hard against the difference between the adoration of his parents and the more exacting demands of the larger world—and indeed his parents themselves exacerbated the problem. In January 2000, when Bush was fighting for his political life in the New Hampshire presidential primary, both of his parents came to the state to help. “This boy,” Bush Sr. proudly told the crowd, “this son of ours, is not going to let you down.”

The assurance fell flat both because voters like to think of their prospective presidents as more than somebody’s boy and because a beaming father’s faith in his favorite child is by definition a blind and unreasoning thing—something everybody but the father himself usually realizes. Some of Bush Jr.’s own problems as president—his prickliness at being challenged, his inability to come up with an answer when a White House reporter asked him if he could think of a single mistake he’d made during his first term—were characteristic of a favored son who has never adjusted to being seen any other way. As family expert and author Judith Harris puts it, the first-among-equals status conferred in the home “doesn’t travel well.”

(Presidents, admittedly, can be poor case studies—albeit very tempting ones—because their mere pursuit of the office implies an ego so overweening as to be borderline unhealthy almost by definition. Still, the particular weaknesses they exhibit in office are usually unique to their backgrounds. Bill Clinton, who yields to no man in the presidential neuroses derby, did not receive the ego pampering a young Bush Jr. did at home or in school—where, as he writes, he was forever being teased for being the chubby boy in the band. That he successfully compensated—indeed overcompensated—for this is a matter of historical record. Still, entitlement was not one of the hurdles he had to overcome to get there, and his desperate need to be adored even by his enemies came not from the expectation that he would be popular—but that he wouldn’t be.)

Favored sibs have other burdens to carry well before adulthood—among them a sense of guilt. It’s hard not to feel pleasure at the preferential treatment that keeps coming at them from Mom and Dad, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for brothers and sisters who are denied it. Jeremy Dunn, twenty, a college student raised in Pacific Palisades, California, experienced just such mixed feelings about his younger sister Ellen, seventeen. Jeremy was their father’s favorite and he and Ellen were painfully aware of it. The unbalanced treatment the kids received got even worse when their parents were divorcing and the natural stresses of a fracturing family were expressed in their father’s occasional outbursts of anger—particularly when they were directed at Ellen. That made Jeremy feel even worse for his sister. He would respond by coming to her defense, and she recognized the effort he was making.

“I remember specifically our dad would start yelling and blow up at me, and my brother would always try and steer his anger away from me,” she says. “I always appreciated it. He was very protective of me. Then I felt guilty because [my father] would be screaming at my brother.” It’s a neat trick when a single parental act—openly preferring one child over another—can leave both kids with a guilt burden to carry. Jeremy and Ellen spun that experience into greater closeness as they got older, but things could just as easily have gone the other way.

One thing that does make even the most blatant favoritism easier to take is when there’s a defensible reason for it and all the kids understand what it is. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is when one child in the household has special developmental or physical needs. Children with Down syndrome or autism certainly require a particular kind of care and attention, including extra applause for skills learned and tasks performed well. Kids with physical challenges—everything from grave conditions such as muscular dystrophy to milder problems such as common scoliosis—will require more time and attention from parents, and that time and attention will necessarily be subtracted from the fixed amount they have to give their other kids. Even the most tolerant siblings won’t always accept this immediately and at some point will begin to feel that, healthy or not, they deserve their full share of care, too. Talking about the situation openly is the best and most direct way to limit resentments or hurt feelings. “Parents should give reasons the differential treatment is important so kids can try to perceive and understand why it’s fair,” says Shawn Whiteman, assistant professor of family studies at Purdue University. “Research suggests that differential treatment may have no negative effects when children understand why.”

Kids are also surprisingly good at understanding that an older sibling will enjoy certain prerogatives that younger sibs don’t get—though this can admittedly be a harder sell than when illness or disability drives the disparate treatment. What’s more, the very fact that the older sib does such trailblazing usually means looser rules and somewhat earlier privileges for the younger ones. Parents may be beside themselves with worry the first time their firstborn goes to school or heads off to camp or gets behind the wheel of a car. By the time the second or third or fourth kids are doing it, they’ve habituated some and everything is more relaxed.

One of the best things about favoritism conflicts is that they usually do fade in significance as children grow older. “Usually,” of course, is not the same as “always,” and childhood resentments may never be entirely forgotten. Life issues such as which child becomes the caretaker of aging parents or which is bequeathed the most in the will can often become occasions to fight old wars and relitigate old grievances.

Still, in the best of circumstances, even those battles can be fleeting. For every sibling bond damaged by parental favoritism there are many more brothers and sisters who do ride out the storms of childhood and make it to adulthood with their love—and their humor—intact. Even into middle age, my brothers and I—including Bruce—continue to try to coax our septuagenarian mother to concede that Bruce was her favorite son. And honoring the code of maternal omertà, she continues to deny it. Age can make even the stoutest defenses slip, though, and one day she and I were recalling a long-ago school talent show that—like so many talent shows when we were children—starred Bruce. My mother beamed throughout the performance, and I glowered throughout it.