New Study Reveals Parents Do Have A Favorite Child. Here's Who It Is.

While a family might fall into a pattern of favoring daughters, older siblings or children who are more conscientious (who wouldn’t want one of those?), there can also be a huge amount of variation over the years in the way that parents feel about their children.

Dr. Blaise Aguirre, a psychiatrist who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of the forthcoming I Hate Myself: Overcome Self-Hatred And Realize Why You’re Wrong About You, told HuffPost, “people, just generally speaking, tend to feel closer to those who are temperamentally similar to who they are.”

For example, if an emotionally intense child has a parent who is less so, “they just don’t understand how a child could be so reactive, and so it can be confusing,” Aguirre said. He added that parents tend to prefer easygoing children, the kind who don’t get calls home from the teacher.

Aguirre also noted that a person’s parenting can change significantly between a first child and subsequent children.

“These relationships are in constant states of flux,” he said. 

Infants, Aguirre noted, are sort of hard-wired to charm their parents in a way that protects their own survival. As children grow, however, some parent-pleasing behaviors can lead to comparisons among siblings and accusations of favoritism.

In addition, “We tend to remember rejection far more than we remember praise,” Aguirre said. “If you’re getting equal amounts of praise and rejection, if you could actually measure 50% praise, 50% rejection, when your parents criticize you for your behavior, you’re going to remember that more.” 

Unless the praise is for a sibling. “You’ll remember your sibling’s positive praise, much more than you remember their rejection,” Aguirre said.

As a parent, you can’t always control how your child recalls and interprets the things that you say or do. You can, however, listen with an open mind to any concerns your child has, whether they have to do with favoritism or something else.

If a child says you’re playing favorites, Aguirre suggested that a parent say something like, “That’s just not my experience, but clearly, it’s yours. So, tell me: What is it that you see?”

“Getting them to kind of understand their own state of mind and understand the state of mind of the parent,” and having them “name and label what their experience is,” Aguirre said, often has the effect of making a child feel less upset.

Aguirre said that he would advise parents to talk with their children without delay about any feelings that arise.

“Often the perception is in the mind of the child,” he said. “I think that the best thing to do is to sort of deal with it right away, lest it become ingrained in the child who sees themselves as less favorable, as being defective in some way.” 

A parent might ask a child to consider another’s perspective, like I did with my daughter, or reassure their child that they love them for what makes them unique, not how their math grades or musical talent compares to a sibling’s.

Aguirre recalled one way that his mother cleverly eliminated the chance that any of her eight children might accuse her of favoritism. 

“When my mom was dying, we were all spending time with her. She said, could she have a chat with each of us individually? And so I went in there, and she says, ‘I’m just going to tell you, you’re my favorite.’”

Later, after all the siblings had their one-on-ones, they spoke about it and discovered that she had told each one of them exactly the same thing.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.