BEST BOOKS ABOUT FAVOURITE CHILDREN

The bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.

THERE has been a game going on in our house recently. When I leave my phone unattended for a minute, one child or other changes its Caller ID to ‘Favourite’.

As a result, I now have to answer it with caution — never quite sure which selfappointed ‘favourite’ is on the line.

Of course, we mothers don’t have favourites — oh no, not at all. However, we are capable of producing remarkably dissimilar people.

Yes, there are some families who, to the outsider, seem to turn out Identikit offspring, and how straightforward their lives must be. But for those of us who draw something different from the lucky bag, it can be more complicated.

Loving them equally is one thing; you can twist yourself in knots trying to treat them all the same.

Anne Tyler explores exactly that parental dilemma in A Spool Of Blue Thread. Retired social worker Abby has raised three children, two of whom have grown into competent adults who act responsibly towards their ageing parents.

But it is the more unsettled son, Denny, who has the stranglehold on his mother’s heart. She worries about him and talks about him all the time.

The very fact he is so difficult makes him, in effect, her most-favoured child. And everyone can see it except Denny himself, who is too busy resenting his younger brother to notice. It’s a relationship that satisfies no one.

Usually, it is the child most like its parent who gets promoted to favourite status: seeing oneself in replica growing into the next generation must be gratifying, and raising a child with whom you have complete sympathy a joy.

Mrs Dashwood, in Sense And Sensibility, is a devoted parent to each of her three daughters, but her darling is Marianne. The beautiful middle child has inherited her mother’s romantic, over-emotional temperament and both think that’s the only way to be.

They love Elinor, the sensible and reserved eldest, but are baffled by her: so calm, so rational, so level-headed! She will never find happiness like that…

In fact, her uncritical upbringing is her undoing, while Elinor develops a self-possesion that is the making of her. How much better, Austen implies, to work things out for yourself than to be indulged, uncorrected and adored.