Favouritism
Published January 11th, 2008Ah favouritism…..a word that makes adult children everywhere cringe. When you were a child, there were a few brief years (or months) when you thought the world was always a safe, happy place where you were the best thing around. Then you started to grow up.
Thankfully, as a child, I didn’t experience this with my own parents, who made sharing a core value and treated us both equally. Sadly, this was not the experience of someone very close to me. He has faced the ugly side of favouritism his whole life. Since I’ve known him, I have by association seen and experienced it firsthand. I think that what really bothers us about this problem might surprise you.
Nobody’s perfect. We all have made mistakes in our relationships. If we are fortunate enough to be introspective, we can learn from them. Parents young and old, I have a little known secret for you…children always know. When they are with you, they spend hours observing every little thing that you do. They watch how you treat them, each other, and everyone else around you. You are the single biggest influence in their lives, good or bad, and even though you are very busy and have your own problems, it’s important to never, ever, forget this.
This person I care about is the youngest of three boys. When he was growing up, the older two played together more often. Now no one has admitted this out loud, but he’s pretty sure that they had tried for a third child because they had wanted a girl. Instead, they got him, and he has been paying the price ever since.
One of his earliest memories was as a toddler watching his brothers play on the beach, while he played alone on the balcony at a hotel (his parents were in the room). The parents decided that they were hungry but didn’t want to pay for room service so they left him alone to find some food. When they returned later, his young unprotected skin had been burnt to a crisp. Although he was so young, he remembers walking around with his family later and a native lady panicking when she saw him and running over to give his parents a salve for his skin. Yes…there are many things wrong with this story, but the point is that he remembered so many details, and this early childhood memory has scarred him for life.
As he grew older, he noticed obvious things, like the support and encouragement that his favourite brother received, whereas he was the family clown. He noticed that the other two brothers went to private school, but they ran out of money by the time they got to him. The other two got swimming lessons, but ofcourse by the time they got around to him they gave up on going very far…besides who needs to have such a basic lifesaving survival skill anyway….? There was also pulling him out of fundamental math classes as child so that he could go to the violin lessons he hated during the day…he only paid for that later when he had to learn basic math so that he could pass his teacher’s college exams. Nobody made the effort to help him learn how to spell properly “because he was a difficult student”…by the way…his mom was an educator. There was also the time that he was sure he broke his foot but no one would listen. When he re-injured the foot later, the doctor pointed out that it had previously been broken! At least his mother felt bad enough to cry that time. I could go on and on, but there is seriously not enough time in the day.
My point…and I do have one…is that this is the role that his parents determined for him in the family. It was okay for him to be around, as long as he wasn’t happier and didn’t do better than anyone else. The real trouble began when he started to break out of this role. He decided that he could do better, and wanted better for his future, so he went through some basic high school fundamentals before he could even apply to university. When he got in, even though they did not support him financially, they were pressuring him to get a job–ignoring the fact that it would be difficult to get the grades that he needed for competitive teacher’s college if he spent time working instead of studying. When he got into teacher’s college his father had the nerve to tell him that he was doing the wrong thing before he got on the plane because it was costing too much. Now they boast about how he is a teacher, but he will never forget the lack of support (and I’m not talking about financial support).
Enter adulthood. Now that children are grown up what better way to control, reward, and show favouritism than with good old money. The parents paid for the other two brother’s weddings and gave them thousands of dollars for their first homes. Since he wasn’t willing to let them control his wedding or meddle in his house transaction, he basically got nothing. They did pay for a couple of things that they had agreed to ahead of time, and gave him some cutlery for the wedding, but that was it. This behaviour was not at all a surprise, given how controlling they are, and how they’ve treated him his whole life. Fortunately, his wife doesn’t believe that money is a substitute for love, kindness, and respect, so she doesn’t care about their money.
The biggest thing that upsets him, is that everybody in the family pretends the blatant favouritism doesn’t exist. Deny, deny, deny, is the family motto. Whenever he has confronted his parents in the past, they have lied and said that they keep a tally to make sure that everyone gets the same. They claim that they never gave one son the money, it was a loan, or they didn’t give as much to another. They forget one thing though: The black sheep son was always paying attention. He saw his brother’s $20,000 wedding gift cheque, he talks to his brother and knows when they accidentally let it slip about some money that has been given to them, things that were bought for them, or how their trip was “taken care of”. Parents, your kids might not say anything, but they always, always, know when you treat them differently. They may not care about what it is they are missing out on, but they certainly will care that you insult their intelligence by pretending it isn’t happening.
Well, they say that you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. Hopefully this article has brought some support to others who have experienced similar feelings. I also hope it makes you more conscious of what you do, and how you do it in front of your children. Just remember that it’s never too late to apologize or make changes–we can all treat each other better than we did yesterday.
