For years, the soundtrack of my household has included some version of: “But why doesn’t she have to do that?” or “You never punish him!” Every time I heard it, I’d get that familiar pang of mother guilt.
Had I gotten lazy? Did I care less about what one did over the other? Was I a terrible parent for being too strict with one and not strict enough with another? Did I, in fact, have a favorite child?
Now, nearly 21 years and three kids into motherhood, I finally understand that while yes, I was slightly less anxious as each kid joined our family, it wasn’t so much that my parenting style was changing. It was that each of my kids needed to be parented differently, and I had been doing it all along without even realizing it.
Parenting isn’t one-size-fits-all
My oldest made this realization the easiest. He genuinely values my advice and still calls me from college to ask for my thoughts on something before he makes a decision. He shares his fears, anxieties, and illness symptoms with me on the regular. But once we talk it through, he almost always goes off and figures things out for himself. With him, parenting is often about stepping back. He wants a sounding board, not a manager, and knowing he’ll take the baton and run reassures me that with him, my job is to guide, not direct.
My middle child is the opposite. Being her parent activates a very specific reflex in me — the instinct to swoop in and take care of it all. She’s the kid I want to protect from anything uncomfortable, the one I have to force myself to let wobble so she can learn to balance. She is smart, capable, and resourceful, but she processes her uncertainty through emotion and anxiety, and when I sense her panic, my impulse is to jump in and fix it. The hardest thing I’ve had to learn is that helping my daughter means not doing things for her but offering solutions while giving her the tools to manage them for herself.
And then there’s my youngest, who behaves as if he’s been fiercely independent since birth. He likes to wave off my involvement and gets irritated if I so much as offer to set an alarm to wake him for school, ask if he’s done his homework, or attempt to do his laundry for him. He doesn’t want to be micromanaged, but likes to know that I am always close by, waiting quietly in the wings for those moments when it’s all just too much, and he wants me to step in. With him, there’s less heavy lifting and more just being there to catch him when he’s falling.
I spent years thinking “fair” meant “the same” — I don’t believe that anymore
For so long, I assumed parenting was something that should feel uniform, a philosophy you carry from one child to the next, maybe tweaking for age but not for temperament. All the while, I was unintentionally adjusting my parenting for each kid, while beating myself up for treating them differently. At some point, I internalized (or let my kids convince me) that “fair” meant “the same.” But the older my kids get, the clearer it becomes that what one kid experiences as support, another might experience as pressure. What one sees as freedom, another might interpret as abandonment.
And while the soundtrack remains the same: “She’s your favorite!” “Why do you let him get away with that?!” I stopped asking myself whether I was getting too lenient or too strict. I started asking a better question: What does this child need from me right now — not what did their sibling need at this age, not what I think I’m supposed to do, or how their sibling wishes I would handle it, but what actually helps this particular kid thrive. I no longer measure my consistency by how similarly I treat my kids, but by how attuned I am to each of them as individuals.
In the end, the thing my children have taught me, each in their own way, is that my job isn’t to parent them the same way three times. It’s to parent three different children in ways that help them become who they’re meant to be based on who they are now.
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