38-year-old parents demand their least favourite child defend them and his spoiled siblings against the rest of the family: ‘They have become such spoiled brats and my parents act surprised when people call it out’ – FAIL Blog

I was a little reluctant at first to side with the scapegoated child, but when the story got to ‘everyone in the family stopped talking to them because of this’, I was finally convinced. Something about how things went down tells me that the parents don’t really consider the first child a child, but they see him more as a parentified helper-son.

My intuition tells me that spoiling the youngest children serves as a way to atone for the guilt they feel towards how they treated the first child, back when they were poor. Of course, the guilt is misdirected to a place that doesn’t help to repair anything; in fact, it makes the wound even deeper, because the child who actually got misstreated is left out, like they can’t deal with the fact that they themselves could’ve treated him that badly.