Why Parents Sometimes Feel They Have a Favorite Child (and What to Do About It)
The other night, I was standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing a pot that had been sitting there since dinner, when I heard the familiar shuffle of my eight-year-old, Leo, coming down the hall. It was 9:15 PM, well past his bedtime. He stood in the doorway, holding a Lego figure with a missing arm.
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “I keep thinking about the robot.”
I dried my hands and sat with him on the couch for ten minutes, helping him rebuild the arm. We didn’t talk about anything important. I just watched his small, careful fingers snap the plastic pieces together. When he finally went back to bed, I felt a wave of affection so strong it almost hurt.
Then I walked past the closed door of my older daughter, Maya, who is eleven. She had been in her room all evening, reading. I hadn’t checked on her. I hadn’t asked about her day. And in that moment, a thought crept in that I have never said out loud to anyone: I enjoy being with Leo more than I enjoy being with Maya right now.
It wasn’t about love. The love is identical, a heavy, permanent thing in my chest. But the liking? The ease? That felt uneven. And that realization is one of the most uncomfortable parts of parenting more than one child.
Most parents I know have had a version of this moment. It might not be as stark as mine, but it’s there. Maybe it’s the toddler who still cuddles versus the seven-year-old who argues about everything. Maybe it’s the child who shares your love of soccer versus the one who would rather stay inside and draw. The feeling is common. Admitting it feels like a betrayal.
The first thing to understand is that favoritism isn’t a single, fixed emotion. It’s often situational and developmental. A newborn needs you in a way a first-grader does not. A child going through a difficult phase—sleep regression, a testing tantrum stage, a rocky start to school—will naturally consume more of your patience, which can leave less for the child who is simply coasting.
In our house, Leo is easy. He’s cheerful, compliant, and still thinks I am the most interesting person in the world. Maya is eleven. She is smart, sharp, and beginning to pull away. She questions rules. She closes her door. She has opinions about my cooking. This is healthy development. It is also exhausting. It is easy to mistake my fatigue for a lack of connection.
But here is the practical part. When I noticed this imbalance, I didn’t try to force myself to feel differently. That doesn’t work. Instead, I made two small, concrete changes.
First, I stopped relying on spontaneous moments of connection and started scheduling them. Every Tuesday after school, Maya and I go to the library for thirty minutes. No Leo. No phone. She picks a book, I pick a book, and we sit in silence together. It is not a deep conversation. But it is a predictable, low-pressure slot of time where she gets my full attention without having to compete for it.
Second, I adjusted the environment. I realized that most of my positive interactions with Leo happened in the living room, where he plays. Most of my negative interactions with Maya happened in the kitchen, where I was trying to cook and she was trying to talk to me while I was distracted. So I started giving her my full attention for five minutes before I started dinner. I sit down at the table with her. I don’t stir anything. I don’t check my phone. I just listen. It is a tiny shift, but it changed the tone of our evenings.
Teachers see this in the classroom, too. The student who is quiet and compliant often gets less attention than the student who acts out. It’s not malicious. It’s just human bandwidth. The quiet kid doesn’t demand the same energy, so we accidentally give them less. In a family, it works the same way.
One of the most useful things I read when I was wrestling with this came from a child psychologist who suggested that parents stop thinking of fairness as “equal time” and start thinking of it as “what this specific child needs right now.” A child going through a hard phase needs more correction, more structure, and more patience. A child in a stable phase needs less. That doesn’t mean you love one more. It means you are responding to the current weather of their development.
That said, there is a line. If you find yourself consistently avoiding one child, or if you notice that one child is always the last to be helped, the first to be blamed, or the one you roll your eyes at when they walk in the room, that is worth paying attention to. Kids are incredibly perceptive. They know when they are the “easy” one and when they are the “difficult” one. And they will build a story around that identity.
So what do you do with the feeling? You name it to yourself. You don’t have to announce it at the dinner table. But you can say, quietly, “I am struggling to enjoy this child right now.” That honesty, even if it stays in your own head, opens the door to action.
For me, the shift came when I stopped trying to make everything equal and started trying to make things specific. Leo gets my spontaneous cuddles. Maya gets my scheduled, uninterrupted attention. Both are getting something real. Both are getting something they need.
Last week, Maya and I were sitting at the library, and she looked up from her book and said, “You know, I like this. Just us.” I nodded. I didn’t say anything profound. But I thought about how easy it is to assume that the child who pulls away doesn’t want you. Usually, they do. They just want you on different terms.
I don’t know if I will always feel this balanced. Some weeks, Leo still feels easier. Some weeks, Maya and I clash over homework or screen time, and I have to work harder to find the thread between us. The feeling of favoritism hasn’t disappeared. But the guilt has softened, mostly because I stopped treating it as a secret and started treating it as information.
It tells me where to put my attention. It tells me which child might be quietly asking for something I haven’t noticed. And it reminds me that being a parent to more than one child is not about splitting your love perfectly in half. It’s about showing up, again and again, in the specific way that each kid needs that day. Some days, that looks like a Lego repair. Other days, it looks like sitting in silence at a library table. Neither is better. They are just different. And that, I think, is okay.
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