‘Mom Always Liked You Best’
Posted in Miscellany, Relationships on 11/04/2009 12:16 pm by JimNow that you're back, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The notion that parents cherish all their children equally — or at least say they do — is so entrenched in our culture that colleagues warned Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University embarking on the first of many studies of family favoritism, that his research would prove futile. No mother, they insisted, would admit to caring more for one son or daughter than another.
So much for that. His team’s interviewers, talking to mothers ages 65 to 75 in the Boston area about their adult offspring, found that most were perfectly willing to name favorites. “Most mothers have very distinct preferences,” Dr. Pillemer said. “There’s one to whom they feel most emotionally close . . .
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