My Son Said He Loves His Mom More—Why Kids Say It and How to Handle It
“Dad, I love Mommy more than you.”
He said it while pulling on his shoes one Tuesday morning. No anger, no build-up. Just a fact, delivered the way you’d announce that the sky is blue or that dinosaurs are extinct.
I laughed at first. “Oh, really?” I said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t even look up.
I won’t pretend it didn’t land a little. It’s a strange thing to hear from your son, even when you know logically that a six-year-old doesn’t keep score the way adults do. But that morning I didn’t feel logical. I felt like I’d lost a competition I hadn’t signed up for.
I said something dull and neutral, like “Thanks for telling me,” and we got in the car and went about our day. But I couldn’t quite shake it. So I spent the next few weeks paying closer attention to when the comment came back, what seemed to trigger it, and what actually helped.
The comments weren’t constant, but they weren’t rare either. Sometimes they showed up at bedtime, sometimes during a disagreement about toys, and sometimes right after my wife walked into the room. “I only love Mommy,” he’d tell me, with zero hesitation. My wife would try to smooth it over—”Oh, but you love Daddy too”—but that usually made him double down.
What helped me the most was finally understanding that this wasn’t about me or her.
At this age, children are starting to figure out how their feelings relate to their actions. They’re also figuring out who they are inside the family system. Declaring a favorite parent is one of the first ways they can exert that small bit of control. It’s not a rejection of the other parent, even though it feels like one.
Think about what a kid gains from saying something like that. They get instant attention. They get a reaction, even if it’s a small one. And they get to feel powerful for a moment, because they’ve just said something that clearly matters to the adults around them. That’s a lot of reward for very little effort.
The real shift came when I stopped trying to correct him. The moment he said it, I had this habit of jumping in with a counterargument. “You don’t really mean that. You love us both. Remember when we went to the park? We had so much fun together.” That approach made it worse. The more I pushed, the more he pushed back. He didn’t want to be talked out of his statement. He wanted to know what would happen when he made it.
So I started treating it like weather. “Okay,” I’d say. “Thanks for letting me know.” Sometimes I’d add something lighthearted, like “Good thing I’m still the best at making your lunch.” No arguing. No negotiation. No trying to convince him that I was in the running. He needed the comment to mean less to me than it meant to him.
That’s easier said than done, though. There were definitely evenings when I’d dropped him off, emptied the dishwasher, and then caught myself replaying the words in my head. I had to do some adult-level self-talk to stop hearing it as a verdict on our relationship. Honestly, one thing that helped was talking to other parents. I learned, pretty quickly, that nearly every family has a version of this. Sometimes it’s about the favorite parent, sometimes it’s about the favorite grandparent, sometimes it’s about which parent gives the better goodnight hug. It’s almost never a real measurement.
We also made a small adjustment at home that reduced the frequency of it a lot. My wife and I stopped competing, out loud anyway. I realized that even in a friendly, teasing way, when my wife said “You’re such a Mama’s boy,” or when I said “He only loves you,” we were reinforcing the game. So we cut that out. We started taking turns for the things he might otherwise pick someone over. Instead of asking, “Which one of us is tucking you in tonight?” we’d just alternate and say, “Dad’s turn tonight, Mom’s turn tomorrow.” Fewer choices about loyalty meant fewer chances to announce a winner.
I also started giving him better words for what he was feeling. On the way home from school one day, he was quiet, and I asked if he was upset that I got on his case about brushing his teeth. He nodded. I said, “You know, you can be mad at me and still love me. Those two things can be true at the same time.” He didn’t say much, but he did look at me in the rearview mirror. A few days later, when I wouldn’t let him have another cookie, he said, “I don’t like you right now”—and that felt like progress. He was getting closer to what was actually true.
Teachers see this too, by the way. It’s not just a home phenomenon. A friend of mine in early childhood education once told me that kids this age often “test” caretakers by saying they prefer one classmate over another, or one teacher over a parent who is picking them up. She said she always tries to name the feeling underneath it. “It sounds like you’re having fun and don’t want to leave,” she’ll say, rather than trying to argue about who is actually more fun.
There is something freeing about the fact that this isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a phase—an annoying, occasionally hurtful phase, but a phase. The more I treated it as normal, the less charge it carried. He still says he loves Mommy more sometimes. Just last week, he put his face right in front of me and whispered, loudly, “I’m a Mommy boy.” I laughed and said, “I know, buddy. I know.”
It didn’t sting the same way. Not because he stopped saying it, but because I stopped hearing it as a threat to our relationship. I know how he shows that he loves me. It’s in the way he curls up against my shoulder during movies, the way he asks me to push him on the swings “higher, higher” even though I’m out of breath, the way he offers me the last bite of his snack without being asked. I don’t need to win a contest to be convinced.
We’ll see what comes next. Maybe in a year he’ll switch and decide he’s a Daddy’s boy, and my wife will get her turn feeling like the runner-up. It’s strange, but I almost look forward to that—not because I want her to feel what I felt, but because it would mean he’s still experimenting, still figuring out what these words can do.
For now, we’re doing okay. The comments come and go. I don’t take them as seriously as I used to, and honestly, I think that’s the real fix: not changing his behavior, but changing how much power it has over me.
That, and keeping the cookie supply well-stocked. Just in case.
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