When you see parents of multiples favour one over others..

L

louismartin

New member
My DS is 4 and recently broke his leg so we are having a lot more "at home" time than previous. My neighbours are the types who were desperate for multiple because "it's cruel to just have one".

My OAD is autistic and non verbal so I know it would be immensely unfair to divide attention he so crucially needs but I was always going to be OAD even before a traumatic birth and PPD/PPA. I've always been acutely aware of favouritism in families as an ex teacher and due to my own upbringing (I am an only too but I saw it in my extended family.)

Today DS and I were counting cars and naming their colours out of the bedroom window when I saw my neighbours kids running on the front. The little boy fell and I am not kidding you when both Mum and Grandma ran over and accused the daughter of doing it purposefully. "wE sAw YoU dO iT!" which devolved into a screaming match. I used it as a lesson to my son that adults don't always see what happened and had I been outside I would have said something. This is several times a week and I don't know if I'm clouded by my own experience, hyper aware as an educator or it really is more prevalent than parents of multiples would have you believe?!
 
@louismartin something that i see a lot of with favoritism that bothers me revolves around extracurriculars. it seems like if the family has a child that excels in a sport, the other kids dont get the same opportunities. one lady i know has a son who is on like 3 different baseball teams, so very time consuming and expensive. and its pretty much all year long. her daughter is 2 years younger and is turned down for anything she shows interest in because her brothers practices and games take up all their time. does he need to be on 3 teams? why not 1 team and free up some time and money for the other kid?
 
@altrechts Or maybe she isn't particularly gifted at any of these things but is interested in them and just enjoys them. It's okay for kids to do activities that they're not naturally exceptional at- skills build over time and with encouragement, its important to keep doing things that we enjoy. If we expect kids to immediately be good at something we set their expectations way too high and then they'll feel bad or even quit before they "get" it.
 
@altrechts That's exactly what happened to my husband. His older brother was very into hockey, which took up all of their time. My husband didn't get a chance to join anything because they were always busy with practice, games, summer hockey camps. I know that he still has some resentment about it.
 
@altrechts I've seen a little of this too. Either the kid plays a sport every single season, plus extra individual coaching, or participates in an expensive sport that competes year round every weekend. Meanwhile the little sisters get drug all over the world to watch big brother do his thing.
 
@louismartin My husband is 1 of 4 and grew up as the middle child until his youngest sibling was born.
The youngest sib became the golden child and also the favourite.

The golden child is now a grown ass adult but doesn’t work and lives at home. Plays video games all day. MIL states this is because her special boy can’t work because he’s too sensitive. He is on the spectrum but very intelligent and can be social. They have a super weird codependent relationship where he knows he can do things for himself but wouldn’t because his parents (mostly his mum) does it all for him.

As a result hubs is 100% OAD, because the last time he saw his mom in person. He told her he has been diagnosed with a food allergy which went undetected for years. She kept on saying oh yes yes but then she would offer him food that he’s allergic to… I remember his face. He was just annoyed, disappointed and sad.

His mom spends so much time telling him how sad she is that he moved away. But when he is there she doesn’t even pay him the courtesy of remembering an allergy.

But she remembers everything about her golden boy.
 
@phydaux Your poor hubby. That really sucks. My sister was the golden child, and I moved out as soon as I could and have been hearing about it for the past 20 years. Now that we both have kids, my mom super favors my sister’s eldest daughter over my daughter and my sister’s youngest, and it’s obvious enough that my six year old asks about it. I have no regrets about moving.
 
@louismartin I had to normalize the emotional abuse in the form of extreme favoritism to cope with living with it. For years I told myself that I wasn’t cute and charming like my sister, and I was just harder to love. The “harder to love” eventually turned into “hard to love” in my mind, and I really internalized that message. I didn’t realize how deeply I’d ingrained that internal message until my daughter turned 5, the age I was when my sister was born and I became invisible and an inconvenience. My daughter was a carbon copy of me at that age, physically and largely personality-wise as well. I kept having flashbacks when I’d look into my daughter’s eyes of looking in the mirror at that age and just despising myself, and it cracked something in me wide open. She was just so easy to love and the thought of her looking in the mirror and seeing what I had seen broke my heart. I had to do some major mental/emotional work to come to terms with my childhood and to rewrite my internal monologue. I wasn’t hard to love; I was a normal kid just as worthy of love as any other.

I tell my daughter all the time, “You are so easy to love!” Because it’s true.
 
@stevenglo Man this cuts. Because I told myself the same. I was often sick as a child (hospitalized) and I was loud. So my brother was given so much more attention after coming home from the hospital or when I was healthy. My brother “deserved” that time since I had to have a parent with me at the hospital. But All I saw as a kid was them choosing to be with my brother and being with me when they had to. I just thought I was “an acquired taste” and my brother was more their taste. I was just “harder to love”.

And because I was harder to love it made sense that they saw my brothers point of view better. Or they went to his sports but not mine. Or they seemed happy to talk about his interests but not mine. Or they paid for my brothers first two years of university but not mine. My brother needed it more or deserved it more. I was harder to be around and harder to love. The family “knew what I was like” and didn’t want to deal with me.

It even extends into my son. He is so much my husband and everything good about my son isn’t from me. If he screams or yells then he is like me but when he is funny or clever or interesting he is just like some other person in my family. My son is incredibly cute and therefore looks nothing like me. When I see bits of myself pop out I get this silence from my own family — my son is incredibly cute and the unspoken thing is that means he cannot look like me.

I’m on the fence with being OAD, but man I would never want a child to feel they were harder to love.
 
@josh_r12 I am so sorry for your experience, and that it has extended into your adulthood and to your son. For what it’s worth, you sound like a compassionate and empathetic parent who is raising an awesome kid….who got a lot of his awesome from you.
It’s so hard because when we are children, we base our self-image on the way the people closest to us see us. So if our parents treat us like an inconvenience, that’s what we feel we are and that becomes deeply ingrained. I hope that you’ve healed and that you know your parents didn’t see you clearly then, and apparently still don’t.
 
@louismartin My husband has a cousin our age, she has 2 girls. They grew up in the Bible Belt, and she got pregnant at 19. Left the baby daddy and got with someone else and for pregnant again 2 years later. Second baby daddy ended up being insane (literally in a mental institution now) and she went back to the first. Which whatever, but here’s the really fucked up part: the girls don’t know they have different daddies and the eldest daughter is clearly the favorite. The younger one had suffered immense mental illness, and had to be hospitalized because she has schizophrenia and the voices were telling her to hurt her family and she cut herself to make it stop. SHE DOESN’T KNOW it’s not just her having inherited her REAL father’s mental illness, they just let her believe she has it harder and struggles more with her grades and such.

They’re both pregnant now, and I’ve had to keep my distance because the whole thing is so fucked up to me. Nobody is going to tell her, she’s likely to pass it on, and everyone just lets her believe it’s just her. I can’t stand it!!!
 
@louismartin Oh yeah. I see it a lot at work. I've mentioned before that IMO from work experience only about 20% of siblings truly get along. I can tell you that in general my parents of those friendly siblings tend to not favor one over the other. They are usually both(or all if 2+) in an extracurricular or 2, both equally excited to see parents at pick up etc.

My other 80% of the kiddos? Ah yes, favoritism so obvious even I pick up on it just from pickup and drop off. Oh and spoiler, cause kids talk and they WILL tell you who is the favorite.

Best thing, to anyone reading this. Don't make things into a competition(i.e I bet you can get dressed before sister) and spend time one on one with them. I have some parents who will pick up one sibling early, and then the other parent will get the other one later. Take one to game and one grocery shopping etc. Ask if they want to go to practice or would they rather be picked up after, that sort of thing. Not always feasible but still done occasionally.
 
@katrina2017 I looked into favoritism as an adult because I grew up being the lesser sibling. The articles I found also stated that favoritism is normal in parents. It is my #1 reason for being AOD.
 
@louismartin I'm an only, and my mums favourite game is calling this out. Whenever it comes up on conversation people say she couldn't understand, that when you have more than one you love them equally. She proceeds to call out their favourite, and they're stunned and try and cover it up. If acquaintances can notice, I can only imagine how the children feel. A big reason I'm having one.
 
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