Mom always liked you — differently

There's no denying it. In any household with more than one child, kids seem to naturally compete for their mother's love and attention. And mothers swear they love every child equally.

But just maybe Mom does really love you best. Or is it just wishful thinking that you're her favorite?

"Mothers worry about that issue of 'Am I closer to one than I am to the other?' " says Cate Dooley, a psychologist with the Wellesley Centers for Women in Wellesley, Mass. "Mothers really need to let themselves off the hook. You're going to have different relationships with each child. It's OK."

With Mother's Day around the corner, new research is shedding some light on what happens when a parent — particularly the mother — gives more time or attention or privileges to one of the children. Past studies have found that less-favored siblings may suffer emotionally, with decreased self-esteem and behavioral problems in childhood, while adult children who were even slightly favored report higher well-being.

It could be a result of gender (favoring the same-sex or opposite-sex child), birth order (the oldest or the baby) or how easy or difficult a child's temperament may be, but a parent's differential treatment — real or perceived — has far-reaching effects, including fueling sibling rivalry, experts say. Such questions are particularly important for Baby Boomers; these unresolved feelings are playing out now in the care of aging parents. Experts agree the feeling that Mom always liked a sibling better can affect lifelong psychological well-being.

"Ask any family and they'll tell you who was the favorite one," says Jacqueline Plumez, a psychologist in Larchmont, N.Y. "People are very shaped by their family situations and how they were treated. You can be 80 years old and still hurt by it and the parent is long, long dead."

In her new book, "Mom Still Likes You Best," author Jane Isay of New York City says favoritism is a "recipe for the next generation to not like each other."

Author Laurel Kennedy's new book, "The Daughter Trap," devotes a chapter to sibling problems related to caregiving for aging parents. Kennedy, founder of a Chicago consulting firm for Baby Boomers called Age Lessons, interviewed 216 women and found that even though none of her questions asked directly about a parent favoring one child over another, about two-thirds of the women said there was a favored child, and most said it was "mother-focused."

"Out of the blue they'd say, 'She always liked my brother better, and he got to go to summer camp in 1968 and I didn't,'" Kennedy says.