The phrase “playing favorites” has a specific shape in the mind of a mother. It arrives when she has noticed herself doing something differently for one child than the other — giving more time, more patience, more latitude, a different kind of structure — and has turned that observation into a verdict. She has decided she is partial. She has concluded she is unfair. And she has, in the process, misread the most accurate thing she could say about herself: that she is paying attention.
I have two children. Megan is in senior high school — self-directed, creative, and at a stage where independence is not just appropriate but necessary. Dylan is in special education, with learning needs that standard approaches don’t reach, and where the right kind of support matters in specific, granular ways. Parenting them looks nothing alike. I love them with equal fierceness. They are different people, in different stages, with different requirements, and treating them identically would not be fair — it would be a refusal to see them clearly.
The day both of them had a bad day at school
A few months ago, both of my kids came home from school on the same afternoon with that particular kind of quiet that signals something went wrong. Different schools, different problems, different versions of the same difficult day.
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With Dylan, I moved into a known pattern. He needs to decompress in a specific sequence — time to settle, a familiar routine, low demands, the particular kind of scaffolding we have built together over years of figuring out what actually helps. Too much conversation too soon makes it worse. Jumping past the transition to ask what happened doesn’t work. There is a structure to how he comes back from hard things, and holding that structure for him is part of what I do.
With Megan, I did almost the opposite. I gave her room. I didn’t ask immediately. I left a gap she could walk into if she wanted to, and when she did, I mostly listened. A teenager who is becoming her own person doesn’t need me to structure her emotional processing — she needs me to get out of the way far enough that she can do it herself, and to still be there when she finishes.
From the outside, you could read that afternoon as evidence that I parent Dylan more carefully. The problem with that reading is that carefully is not the same as more. The precision I apply to Dylan is visible and structured. The precision I apply to Megan is the kind that hides itself — the kind that requires me to know when not to intervene. Both took deliberate effort. The effort just looked completely different.
What the research actually says about treating siblings differently
The language around what researchers call parental differential treatment tends to foreground harm. The studies that get the most attention measure the negative outcomes: which sibling feels less loved, how resentment takes root, what the long-term relational costs look like. Those findings are real. Favoritism — the kind rooted in preference rather than need, in a child who simply fits you better than their sibling — does produce harm.
But the research also draws a distinction that rarely makes it into everyday parenting conversations. Weimiao Zhou and Alesia Woszidlo, whose study of 325 young adults was published in the journal Family Relations, found that different treatment is not inherently damaging — that treating siblings equally does not always mean treating them exactly the same, particularly when siblings differ in age or have varying developmental needs. “It’s OK to show differentiation,” Zhou said. What produced harm in their study was not the difference itself, but the absence of an explanation for it — children who could not account for the difference to themselves were left to fill the gap with unflattering interpretations. When the reason was visible, the sting was reduced.
Alexander Jensen, a family life professor at BYU who has studied favoritism across thousands of families, has observed something similar from a different angle. “Sometimes parents get so concerned about treating their kids the same that they might overlook individual needs,” he has noted. He has also found that perception matters as much as practice: “It’s not just how you treat them differently, but how your kids perceive it.” A child who understands why things are different is in a fundamentally different position from a child who doesn’t.
The word “favoritism” implies preference without cause. What I do with my children is something else — treatment calibrated to actual need. The difference between the two is not semantic. It is the difference between parenting on autopilot and parenting while paying attention.
What structure means for one, and space for the other
I am not a psychologist, so what follows is the working theory of one mother built from years of paying close attention to two specific kids — not a framework to apply wholesale to anyone else’s family.
For Dylan, structure is a form of safety. Not rigidity — safety. He thrives in predictable sequences. He learns best when ideas are broken into pieces, when there is a visible path through the material, when the scaffolding is explicit enough that he can see how each step connects to the next. The slowness and specificity I bring to working with him is not because I think he is less capable. It is because I have learned, through the patient accumulation of paying attention, what his version of capable looks like — and it requires a particular kind of environment to emerge.
For Megan, space is a form of respect. She is at the stage of adolescence where working things out herself is how she develops confidence in her own judgment. If I over-explain, I undermine. If I step in before she has tried, I signal that I don’t trust her capacity. The restraint I practice with her — the not-rushing-in, the letting-her-lead — requires just as much deliberate effort as the scaffolding I build for Dylan. It simply looks like doing less.
When I’ve been closest to the edge of what I can hold, the most useful thing I found outside my own family was a therapist who understood neurodiversity — not just as a resource for Dylan, but as a place for me to think through what I was carrying.
The parenting move that looks like equal care is treating both children identically. The move that actually is equal care is giving each of them what they need, in the form that helps them — which means learning two completely different people, staying current with each as they change, and resisting the temptation to simplify.
The conversation Megan and I had
At some point Megan raised it with me — not as an accusation, more as an honest noticing. She had observed the differences over years of living alongside them and wanted to understand. The question, when it came, was essentially: why do you do that differently for him?
What I told her, as plainly as I could, was something that had taken me longer than I expected to articulate even to myself: that giving the same thing to two different people is sometimes the least fair thing you can do. That fair isn’t identical. That the scaffolding Dylan receives isn’t something she is being denied — it is something he needs in a way she doesn’t. And that the room I give her isn’t inattention; it’s what she requires at exactly the stage she’s at.
She understood. Not instantly, and not without more conversation, but she understood. What helped most wasn’t the explanation in isolation — it was that the explanation mapped onto years of observable reality. She could look back and see the consistency. She could see that what Dylan received from me was tied to his actual needs, rather than preference. Children, it turns out, are quite good at reading genuine versus performed. Megan could see that I was paying attention to both of them. The attention just looked different.
This is the finding that stays with me from Zhou and Woszidlo’s research: that it is the visibility of the reason — not the sameness of the treatment — that matters to children in the end. The meaning of the difference is what children are actually tracking.
The phrase “playing favorites” belongs to a model of fairness built for a world where children are essentially interchangeable — where giving more to one necessarily takes from the other. Real parenting doesn’t work that way. The attention you give to one child’s specific needs does not reduce the attention available for the other’s specific needs. What it requires from you is more: more observation, more flexibility, more willingness to hold two separate frameworks at the same time, more patience with the fact that nothing you learn about one of your children transfers automatically to the other.
That is the more demanding form of love the title of this essay points to. The love that earns equity child by child — quietly, without an audience, across all the different-looking days of a single motherhood.