Favoritism is a sad but common part of many family dynamics. Being the child who their parents didn’t favor can lead to a lifetime of striving to please people and feeling like they’ll never be good enough. There’s enough competition at school and work that there’s no need for it in families. Competing for the basic feeling of being loved can have highly negative effects on the competitors, and yet some parents facilitate it. There are so many reasons a parent could favor one kid over another, and almost none of them are anything the child can control. Sometimes, parents wanted a different gender for their baby, or they didn’t want the number of kids they ultimately had. Maybe they’re judgemental about a child’s appearance or achievements outside of the family and prop up the child they see as superior in those categories. The 15-year-old girl in this story has been through the ringer regarding favoritism, and it’s heartbreaking to read about.
I will never understand why people want to double up on “special days.” If you could have a 4th of July party and a birthday party on two different days, why combine them into one day? I get that it’s difficult to get people to show up for one special event, let alone two, but as long as they’re spaced apart in a reasonable way, there’s no reason you should have to do a halfhearted birthday celebration because of an unrelated event. I don’t care how old you are; if your birthday is consistently eclipsed by some other holiday or by uncaring family members, it can get you down.
The teenager in this story got his birthday overshadowed by the gender reveal of his baby sibling. That’s bad on its own, but the fact that his mom gave him the gender reveal in place of an actual gift is wild.