Favouritism In Children

Every child is different in their personality, thought-process, and through the actions they choose to make. However, all children will be able to detect differential treatment. When one child is favoured over the other, there are many different possible ways that the children would react towards the favouritism. The child who is favoured could choose to take advantage of the favouritism and bully the other sibling, however there are children who have a mature mindset or sees the unfairness in treatment and chooses to protect their sibling instead. The child who wasn’t favoured may choose to remain quiet and allow their other sibling to bully them or they may stand up for themselves against their parents. There are many possibilities of how

As many researchers had suggested, due to how much of siblings’ lives overlap with one another, the children become much more ‘sensitive towards differences between themselves’ (Brody et al., 1987; Daniels et al., 1985; McHale & Gamble, 1987; Stocker et al., 1989). The comparison of one another is a natural behaviour when both siblings are willing to fix traits they feel are bad compared to traits that they feel are good about their siblings. However, because of their sensitivity in the differences between each other, this can lead to greater sensitivity when one or all siblings detect favouritism and differential treatment. They may feel jealousy, however the way they react may be different than what most people believe siblings would react. Of course, there will be children who become frustrated and may take out their frustration through conflicting interactions with their siblings, but there may be children who simply ignore the favouritism and go on with their lives. It all depends on their way of thinking, level of maturity, and the way they were brought up. Predicting the possible results for this experiment was difficult when there are so many possible reactions the children may choose to

The self-questionnaires will operationalize the experiment, however the way the children answer the questions may vary, depending on how they look at the events that occured at home is like based on a 5 points scale. The interviews would gather much more in depth information about the child’s perspective of situations that occurred at home, how they felt about their siblings, and how they felt about their overall week as they detect the different ways of treatment their parents had towards the siblings. The quantitative data gives numbers to how the children feel, however the qualitative data is what gives the children the opportunity to explain their position towards their siblings, giving us more data to determine the quality of the sibling relationships. Another confound would be with how the parents choose to interact with their children. The way parents interact with their children in one family can be different to how other parents may choose to interact with their children. When given a way to treat their children, the parents may choose to interact with their children in the way they see fulfills the requirements of their position in the experiments. This doesn’t mean that they will interact in the same way, therefore the children from one family may be subjected to treatment that isn’t the same as the treatment other children from another