“No dada, I WANT MOM!”
I’ve heard that phrase no less than 1,000 times as a parent.
Sometimes it’s when I’m trying to help one of my kids get dressed. Sometimes it’s bedtime. Most often it’s after they’ve fallen down and gotten hurt, and I’m literally standing right there ready to comfort them.
But nope.
They only want Mom.
When I talk about this online I often get some version of “Well, no surprise here. Mom’s are basically ALWAYS the default parent.”
But that’s not true in my case.
On pure hours alone I probably do more than 50% of the hands-on parenting in our household...
Not to mention, I’m also a parenting educator, I wrote a best-selling book on parenting, and a doctoral researcher in developmental psychology. I have literally spent YEARS studying how children’s brains develop and teaching parents how to build stronger relationships with their kids.
But do you think my kids care about my resume? Do you think they carefully considered my qualifications before deciding to put me in second place?
I mean, you would this that if ANYONE could figure out how to become their child’s preferred parent, it would be me.
Apparently not.
And while I’d love to tell you that all my education and understanding the developmental psychology behind this phenomenon makes it easy for me to shrug off, that wouldn’t be entirely true.
Being rejected by your own child hurts. Even when you know, intellectually, that they’re not really rejecting you…
But there’s also another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. While the non-preferred parent is often feeling rejected, the preferred parent is usually EXHAUSTED.
They’re the only one who can do bedtime, or help with a scraped knee, or sit next to the child at dinner. The non-preferred parent might be desperate to help, but even a whiff of that will send some kids into hysterics.
So one parent feels rejected and the other feels totally overwhelmed… and neither feel like they can do anything about it.
But actually they can.
What if I told you that your child’s parental preference isn’t necessarily evidence that anything has gone wrong? In fact, there’s good reason to believe that these preferences are a normal and potentially adaptive part of human development and research gives us ways we can help balance this out.
First let’s talk about why kids default to parent preference.
Attachment hierarchy is a feature, not a failure
There’s a concept in Evolutionary developmental psychology called an attachment hierarchy, and understanding it has completely changed how I think about parental preference.
Attachment theory proposes that children can develop meaningful attachment relationships with multiple caregivers but tend to organize those relationships hierarchically, particularly when they’re distressed.
In other words, when children are frightened, hurt, or overwhelmed, they often have a specific person they prefer to seek out for comfort and protection.
And from an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense.
Imagine you’re a three-year-old living fifty thousand years ago. You’re playing outside the cave (or more likely the camp) when you suddenly, something large moves in the bushes.
Before deciding where to run, you stop and carefully evaluate every adult around you. Who is closest? Who is strongest? Who has the most experience protecting small children from predators? Perhaps you could compile a quick list of pros and cons before making your….. Crunch… you took too long. Game Over. Now you’re lunch.
Alternatively, you immediately run toward the person your subconscious has programmed itself to rely on for protection before your conscious mind even perceives the threat.
And, morbid as it sounds, that’s what we call “Natural Selection.”
When your safety might depend on getting to a trusted caregiver quickly, having a preferred person to turn to could be an incredibly useful feature, not a failure.
In a 2013 study published in Infant Behavior and Development, researchers looked at which parent two-year-olds preferred when they were upset.
And what they found was fascinating.
When kids were happy and content, they didn’t show much preference for one parent over the other. But when they were upset, they tended to seek out the parent who did most of their caregiving.
And here’s the really interesting part: That preference DID NOT depend on how securely attached they were to either parent.
They could be JUST as securely attached to the non-preferred parent
In other words, a child could have a perfectly secure, healthy attachment to one parent and STILL scream for the other when they got hurt. It was just the parent they were most conditioned to rely on.
I think that’s an incredibly important distinction for parents to understand.
Just because your child prefers the other parent doesn’t mean they love you less, trust you less, or even feel less safe with you.
How we accidentally make the preference worse
Imagine Mom is trying to put her three-year-old to bed but the kid is dead set that they want Dad.
Mom explains that Dad is busy. The child cries. Mom tries to read a book, and the child cries harder. Eventually, after 20 minutes of escalating frustration, Dad comes upstairs.
He takes over bedtime, the child settles down, and everybody breathes a collective sigh of relief. Problem solved… for tonight.
Except, what happens tomorrow night?
Well, assuming nothing changes, probably the exact same thing.
Every time Mom attempts bedtime, the child protests, Dad eventually takes over, and the child never gets much opportunity to experience Mom as the person who helps them through the bedtime routine.
Meanwhile, Mom gets less practice doing bedtime, Dad becomes increasingly indispensable, and the preference potentially grows stronger.
In family systems theory, we might understand this as a self-reinforcing pattern.
So what do we do about it instead?
Here’s four things research and theory tell us:
1. Stop trying to convince your child to choose you.
When you’re the non-preferred parent, it’s incredibly tempting to try to persuade or even guilt your child that you’re just as good as the parent they’re asking for.
“Come on, buddy! Daddy can do bedtime too!”
“Don’t you want to read with me?”
“What if we read your FAVORITE book?”
And when that doesn’t work, maybe you start offering increasingly ridiculous incentives or even threats until what began as a simple bedtime routine has turned into a negotiation in which you’re either offering two extra books, a pillow fort, and possibly a trip to Disney World or telling them that if they don’t like it, “NO READING; NO SONGS; STRAIGHT TO BED!!”
Here’s the problem: You’ve made your child’s preference the subject of a negotiation.
And they have already made their side of that abundantly clear.
Instead, we acknowledge their preference without treating it as something you need to change.
“I know you really wanted Mom tonight. It’s disappointing when things don’t go the way we want. Tonight I’m doing bedtime, and I’m right here with you.”
That’s it.
You don’t need to explain why you’re equally qualified to tuck them in. You don’t need to convince them that they should enjoy being with you. And you DEFINITELY don’t need to make them feel guilty for wanting the other parent.
Remember, their preference is not a rejection of you.
It’s just brains doing brain things.
They can want Mom. They can even be disappointed that they didn’t get Mom.
And you can still be the person who lovingly puts them to bed.
2. The preferred parent has to stop being the rescue squad.
This is where things tend to go off the rails for a lot of families…
