J. Jill Suitor: ‘Maybe Mom Did Always Love You Best, But Does it Really Matter? Mothers’ Favoritism and Disfavoritism in Later-Life Families’

J. Jill Suitor, distinguished professor of sociology and faculty associate of the Center on Aging and the Life Course, discussed “Maybe Mom Did Always Love You Best, But Does it Really Matter? Mothers’ Favoritism and Disfavoritism in Later-Life Families” at the Westwood Lecture Series on April 27, 2023.

Abstract. Despite a powerful social norm that parents should treat offspring equally, beginning in early childhood and continuing through adulthood, parents often differentiate among their children in such domains as closeness, support, criticism, pride and disappointment. In this presentation, Dr. Suitor will share what she has learned from studying parental favoritism and disfavoritism in more than 550 later-life families she has followed across the past two decades as part of the Within-Family Differences Study. Using data collected from mothers and their adult children, she will describe continuities and changes in patterns of favoritism and disfavoritism across time, and discuss the consequences of mothers’ differentiation for their sons’ and daughters’ psychological well-being and relations with their siblings, particularly in the face of family crises, such as mothers’ declines in physical and cognitive health and parents’ deaths.

Bio. Dr. Suitor (Ph.D., SUNY-Stony Brook, 1985) is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of the Center on Aging and the Life Course at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the effects of interpersonal relations on well-being, particularly relationships between parents and adult children and among adult siblings. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Spencer Foundation, and the USDA for a total of more than 30 years and has resulted in the publication of over 125 journal articles and book chapters. She has also served as a standing member of the National Institutes of Health Study Sections on Social Psychology, Personality & Interpersonal Processes, and Social Sciences & Population Studies. She has received the Behavioral and Social Sciences Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America, and is an elected Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Since 2001, she has led the Within-Family Differences Study (WFDS), an NIH-supported panel investigation of the causes and consequences of within-family differences and parental favoritism in more than 550 multigenerational families.