You, Son, Are Only My Second Favourite

Eric Weinberg broke a cardinal rule of parenting in a recent blog post for Newsweek. Not only does he favour one of his sons over the other, he actually admitted it publically.

Benjamin, the older kid, is three and a half.  “He’s an unbelievably sweet, smart, Spider-Man-obsessed kid who wakes up smiling, and goes to bed asking me to lie next to him in the dark and tell him the story I made up about a monster who uses lemons and oranges and cherries and grapes and blueberries to make giant rainbows in the sky”, writes Eric Weinberg.

His little baby brother Julian, meanwhile, has a head that looks like a lightbulb. Weinberg was hoping for a girl.

I say “second favorite” only because I don’t love Julian as much as I love Ben. And I say “son” because he’s not a daughter, which is what I really, really wanted. Badly. And I say “my” because I stubbornly choose to believe I helped produce him, despite the fact that he’s almost a year and a half old and resembles me about as much as a slice of cheesecake resembles Jeff Goldblum.

The post has attracted 941 comments so far, most of them condemning Weinberg as a shallow, hateful jerk.

But is it really so shocking to admit you have a favourite? As Keri Fisher pointed out in her recent article on the topic, ‘Playing Favourites’, A 1997 Cornell University study found that 80 percent of older mums (anonymously) admitted to having a favourite child. But only 60% of kids knew there was a favourite in the house, which indicates that many parents make the wise decision to keep that information to themselves.

Favourites may also come and go — sometimes it’s the child who is being less difficult, sometimes it’s simply the child that’s asleep.

Weinberg admits at the end of the article he is deeply in love with his second, funny-looking kid. Let’s just hope Julian never finds a copy of the article.