Parental Favouritism - Test 4

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Proficiency Testbuilder, 4th Edition, Mark Harrison, Macmillan

You are going to read an extract from an article about the attitudes of parents towards their children. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections (A–F). The sections may be chosen more than once.

The American science writer Jeffery Kluger has just published a book in which he argues that, whether we admit it or not, parental favouritism is hard-wired into the human psyche. 'It is my belief that 95% of the parents in the world have a favourite child, and the other 5% are lying,' he declares in The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us. That particular figure may be guesswork, but there is plenty of evidence that would seem to back him up. Kluger cites a Californian study of 384 families, who were visited three times a year and videotaped as they 'worked through conflicts'. The study found that 65% of mothers and 70% of fathers exhibited a preference for one child. And those numbers are almost certainly under-representative, since people behave less naturally when they are being watched.

Every couple of years, in fact, a new report comes out purporting to lift the lid on parental favouritism. Most often – though by no means always – older siblings seem to come out on top. In 2009 two British professors, David Lawson and Ruth Mace, published a study of 14,000 families in the Bristol area. They found that each successive sibling received 'markedly' less care and attention from their parents than their predecessors. Older siblings were even fed better, as a result of which they were likely to be up to three centimetres taller than their younger siblings. They also had higher IQs, probably because they had the benefit of their parents' undivided attention for the first part of their lives.

Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that there is a sound logic to this. A firstborn automatically absorbs a huge amount of parental time and energy; and once you've invested that much in one child, you might as well keep going – if only to protect the investment. However, a survey of 1,803 British parents with two children claimed to show that younger siblings were given preferential treatment 59% of the time. Parents were more likely to side with a younger child in an argument, lavish them with affection and let them have their own way.

It's at this point, I must admit, that I start to feel a bit impatient with the experts. A science that can absorb so many contradictory variables hardly seems like science at all. And if, as the experts all seem to agree, favouritism is so common as to be almost universal, doesn't that make it just – well, normal? Undoubtedly there are families where favouritism is blatant and sustained enough to be seriously destructive. But in most cases, surely, it does not merit such pathologising.

When I solicited confessions of favouritism from my fellow parents, I had no luck at all. Lots of people admitted to treating their children differently at different times, according to their needs (and how annoying they're being). But not one felt this reflected any fundamental preference. It is simply part of the warp and weft of family life. The truth is that favouritism is an awfully blunt word for such a complicated subject. How we treat our children is affected by any number of shifting, interlacing factors: birth order, gender, changes in circumstances, our own childhood experiences. Then, too, some characters just hit it off better than others.

'I think most of us have short-term favourites, depending on who's going through a "phase",' says Suzanne, a mother of four. 'You can feel immense affection for one child on a Tuesday who then drives you to distraction on Wednesday. But the underlying love is just as intense for all of them. I think long-term favouritism is bookselling nonsense in the majority of cases.' In an anonymous online survey for the website Mumsnet, 16% of mothers admitted to having a favourite child. That's quite a lot – it's a big deal to admit to such parental malpractice, if only to yourself – but it hardly amounts to the psychological pandemic of Kluger's imaginings. On the other hand, things do tend to look different from a child's perspective. Even in the happiest families, siblings instinctively compete for their parents' love. Scrupulous emotional accountants, they are constantly totting up incidents of perceived unfairness. So it makes sense for parents, too, to keep a watchful eye on their own behaviour.

Parental Favouritism

a general pattern that emerges from the majority of investigations into favouritism

the need for parents to be conscious of the way they treat each of their children

a theory as to why a certain child may be the subject of favouritism

the extent to which children focus on their parents' attitude towards them

a feeling that the study of favouritism may not be worthwhile

evidence of parents' greater tolerance for a certain child

the large variety of reasons affecting parents' attitudes towards their children

a factor that could affect the reliability of research into favouritism

distrust of what some parents say about favouritism in research

how difficult it is for parents to acknowledge favouritism

In which section are the following mentioned?

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