Jenkins – differential parenting

Differential parenting is really about children being treated differently within the family, and it tends to be examined on things like differential warmth and attention and things like negativity. So does one child get more shouting at than another? Does one child get a lot more sensitivity from the parent? Does the parent seem to understand one child much better than another child? Children are sensitive to those differences and they think about those differences. Now, a lot of what we see is absolutely innocuous.  

One child is younger than another, and the kid totally understands that the reason why they get more attention than so and so is because they are younger and they need more, and the older kids recognize that and they make allowances for that. What kids tend to get really upset about is experiences of unfairness. So when they feel that an adult is more connected to a child, then those experiences of unfairness start coming out, and that’s what we need to pay a lot of attention to.  

When you have higher levels of social disadvantage, then as I’ve said to you, you have greater differential parenting. The parents get spread out, more reactive to individual idiosyncratic aspects of the kids, and when we take account of parents, what we call their reflective functioning, so we interview parents about their own childhoods, their own experiences in their childhoods. 

Parents that are more reflective do less of this differential parenting even when they’re in these high risk circumstances. So, again for me, that’s an intervention pathway. It’s really saying let’s think about our experience of being parented and parenting our own kids. Let’s think about what these kids need on an individual level, and then let’s try and bring those things together in the way that we parent our kids.  

It’s about explaining why I needed to do this differently with Joe than I am with Sam, just explain it, and talk about it, and make the kids see the fairness in what your rationale is for it, and for them, their internal experience of it will be better.