As a parent of two children, there are certain things it is incumbent on me to never do. Have the television on during dinner. Allow them to eat stuff they pick up off the street. And play favourites.
I must be even-handed in administering attention, love and treats, never showing preference for one, nor slighting the other. I’ve seen 'East of Eden', have read my Shakespeare, know my soap operas - I understand how this stuff pans out. The pathway of parental partiality leads to the sanatorium of toxic sibling rivalry.
I’m hoping our kids grow up to have a loving and supportive relationship with one another (though seeing the way they squabble over the iPad, it could be an uphill struggle) - the last thing I want to do is sow resentment’s seeds.
A while ago, I made the mistake of recommending the film 'Sophie’s Choice' to my partner. At the end of it, wiping her eyes after watching Meryl Streep’s tragic heroine opt, in the film’s harrowing, titular scene, to send her seven-year-old daughter to her death in Auschwitz’s gas chambers and her son to life in the labour camp, my partner turned to me accusingly (which is how she so often turns to me, these days) and demanded: “Well, who would you choose?”
Knowing my desire for a quiet life, she just loves to challenge me with awful hypotheticals.
“I couldn’t. I have no idea. Thankfully, I don’t have to, and never will,” I eventually answered, once it became clear a response was expected, that I couldn’t laugh it off ('Sophie’s Choice' is hard to laugh off, despite Streep’s somewhat strained Polish accent).
“Hmmmph,” she retorted. “I know who you’d choose. I know.”
“No, you don’t. Because I don’t know.”
“I do,” she insisted, actually snorting with derision.
“Yeah, well. I know who you’d choose, too.”
Recent research on parental preferences and birth order sends mixed messages. While studies undertaken by the Universities of Leipzig and Mainz in Germany uncovered little evidence of “middle child syndrome” or any other personality traits commonly associated with familial pecking order, a 2013 survey of over 2000 parents in the UK found that about a third were prepared to state that they had a favourite child.
What shocks me most about those findings is not that the mums and dads had a favourite, but that they were prepared to admit it. Isn’t this the stuff we don’t even own to ourselves, let alone to a questionnaire on some parenting website?
Unconditional love. A precious and magical commodity of which successful reproduction is meant to provide an endless supply. And then we’re supposed to dish it out in perfectly equal portions, regardless of how maddening or enchanting our individual offspring might be.
Parents are human beings, too. Careworn, exhausted and narcissistic human beings. Naturally, we might find ourselves drawn to the child who most reminds us of ourselves.
Our daughter was our first child, is highly strung and prone to scenes of high drama. As a first child of sensitive disposition myself (aka a whingeing wuss), I find it easy to empathise. Our son shares his mother’s earthiness and vigour, besides being her spitting image. I’m aware of how the classic split goes, too, daddies doting on their little girls, mothers siding with their boys.
But, damn it, I refuse to be so predictable, so corny! My own parents managed to convince my sister and me that we were equally loved (at least, I think they did - no, let’s not go there), so I’m determined to do the same for our kids. I do my utmost not to take sides, to bestow attention and tenderness on each of them equally, while never submitting to the temptation to throttle either.
The truth is, the barometer of affection is constantly shifting. On any given day, under any given circumstance, I’ll love both of my children beyond measure, but probably like one more than the other, because I’m human.
Last week, China announced the reversal of its Orwellian one-child policy. After 35 years and an estimated 400 million prevented births (sometimes enforced), with a demographic now skewed towards the aged and the male, and notwithstanding the myriad bureaucratic hoops through which couples wanting to procreate will still need to leap, the government will now permit them to have a second child.
A boon for human rights and individual freedom, no question, but with freedom come hang-ups and guilt-trips.
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China ends strict one-child policy
The Chinese will have to manage these themselves. As for me, I’m sticking to my guns. No favourites in this house, whatever my partner alleges.
Of course, there’s a flip side to all of this. The kids are human, too, and, when push comes to shove, love to deeper love, might prefer one parent to the other.
Another awful hypothetical that it’s easier not to contemplate.
Ian Rose is a Melbourne-based writer.
