My Son Told Me He Loved His Dad More: One Parent’s Lessons on Handling Rude Comments
He was eating his cereal, the same way he does every morning—milk first in a specific ridged bowl—when he looked up and asked, “Why do you always sit in the wrong chair?”
That wasn’t the rude part. The rude part came after I moved to the other side of the table.
“I don’t mean this table. I mean Daddy’s side. In the car. When we go somewhere.” He dipped his spoon, let it clink against the rim. “I wish Daddy drove me to school.”
I told him that was the plan tomorrow, that he’d have the whole car ride with his dad. It already was the plan, and I said it with what I thought was inspired morning patience. But that wasn’t enough. He put his spoon down, looked at me with no expression at all, and said, “That’s fine. Because I love Daddy more than you.”
Rude? Definitely. Heart-stopping? More than I’d like to admit. But to a six-year-old, it was just a statement of fact, like announcing the sky was grey.
I had a childhood memory of saying something similar to my own mother. I was older, maybe nine, and she had made my favorite dinner—something I surely requested. I remember the feeling of being at a crossroads, loving them both, a little confused about what I was supposed to do with so much feeling. I told my mother I loved my father better, purely to see what she would do. What did she do? She said, “Well, good,” and kept chewing. That was it. The satisfaction didn’t come; the game was over.
My son wasn’t playing a game, though. He just seemed genuinely, if transiently, annoyed with my existence. The morning was routine, nothing was wrong. And this is the thing I learned—that’s exactly when these declarations tend to appear.
There’s a real developmental piece to this that I’ve picked up from talking to his teacher and just watching him at park benches and birthday parties. Favoritism, saying brutal things about love, is one of the first tools a child gets for carving out a little control. They’re figuring out that they have power in relationships. Telling me I’m not the favorite doesn’t mean he feels no love for me. It means he figured out that this particular sentence gets a reaction. It gives him a position in the family. He’s not losing anything by saying it; he’s just testing.
What I didn’t want was for this to become a Thing, see. I have a cousin who still recounts the specific afternoon her daughter picked her father. It’s a family legend. The daughter is now nineteen. Both parents still get a pained look when someone brings it up. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want my bedtime tuck-in to be the place where my son had to manage my feelings.
So the first thing I did was the hardest part—I stopped being a good audience. That’s practical. It’s not cold; it’s just removing the fuel. The first few times he did the “I love Dad more” bit, I’d respond with a light, “Okay.” Not shrugging it off in a dramatic way, just truly neutrally. No hurt eyebrow raise. No sigh. No “How could you say that to Mommy?”
There were a few different scenarios going on. In the morning, it was his way of getting his dad to the front of his mind, to feel closer to him because his dad was leaving for work. That was a good thing. I started making a small ceremony of it. Instead of getting defensive, I’d get specific. “Yeah. He has that cool fuzzy spot on the side of his head. I love that spot too.” Or, “He gives the best shoulder rides, doesn’t he?” I made space for his love of his dad to be openly stated, even if it was coming out clumsily.
Then there was the other kind. When he was actually annoyed with me. I could tell the difference. The I-love-Dad-more that follows a request getting “I’ll do it after I finish folding these” or a firm no about more screen time. That one isn’t really about his dad at all. That one is about wanting me to feel a pinch of guilt.
For that version, I had a phrase that I said out loud, almost to myself: “I love you even when you’re mad at me.” And then I didn’t cue him for the pity-party. I just continued doing the laundry or whatever it was. That’s concrete. It’s also one of the most grounding things we can do: be the unbothered ground.
We also made a small adjustment around how we handled attachment. My son has a little petting ritual when we read at night. He plays with my hair. He doesn’t play with his dad’s hair. One realization—a weird one that came to me in the middle of a crying fit (his, not mine)—was that his affection is physical. When he said Daddy, what he often meant was “I want the bigger, rougher version of the wrestling game.” It never occurred to me to be hurt by him preferring one toy over another. This was just another kind of preference.
I remember a conversation we had at dinner. My husband helped me with a plate, and my son pointed it out. “Why’d you say thank you, Mom?” I said it was polite. He said, “Daddy doesn’t say thank you to you.” This was a lie, but it was interesting. He was searching for some data point to shore up his current hypothesis: that Daddy was the best. I shrugged. “K. I know I’m my own favorite person.” He actually laughed at that. He didn’t know what to do with it.
The teacher in me—and yes, I am an English teacher, and yes, I am deeply aware of how often I use terms like “least intervention” at home—kept whispering that the less we react with big hammer blows, the less a child needs to use that hammer. The more we explain or banish the child to the bedroom for speaking rudely, the more we’ve made the act significant. But that doesn’t mean letting disrespect fully pass by. I draw a line if he’s rude to his sister or if he’s clearly using it to hurt. I’ll say, “That tone doesn’t work here. Try asking for what you need.”
The issue is that this declaration of who he loves more has faded in and out over several months. There was a week where I wasn’t “allowed” to drive him to school, and then last Tuesday, I was the favorite. He demanded that I carry him up the stairs and that I read two extra books. He looked at me, catching his breath from rambunctiousness, and said with total authority: “I love Mommy more.” He said it like I won a prize for being the one who could make his dinosaur do the roar.
I don’t know that we’ve “handled it” in any clean sense. The rude asks still come out. But I’ve started to hear them not as a referendum on my position in his life, but as a child trying out the levers of love. He’s measuring the room to see how much his feelings matter. The more my part of the room remains calm, the more the levers have nothing to push against.
And I’m aware that this might come back in a different form—the teenager version, the one that says something harsher than “I love Dad more.” But I think I’m doing it right when I fumble into honesty: I told him the other night that even when I’m mad at him, I’m in his corner. He was yawning and pulling his blanket over his head. And he said, “Moms don’t get to have feelings.” That one stung a little. But it also made me laugh. We’re one step away from a real conversation.
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