Why is Sherlock mummy's favorite?

 (Sherlock meta by thediogenes, harriet-spy and anarfea)

Q: Why do you think Sherlock is mummy's favorite son? (she favors him) Beside his drug addiction, he doesn't make an effort to please his mother. On the other hand, Mycroft is the non problematic son with a stable and respectable job.

thediogenes:

I’m an elder sibling with a similar age gap between me and my brother and my educated guess is I think it’s down to the following reasons:

• Mycroft is considerably older than the other two so is almost certainly held to higher standard of maturity and behaviour from the get go. 
• Mycroft is emotionally closed off, secretive, cold, snarky, pragmatic to the point of moral ambiguity, all that good stuff which makes having a nice warm relationship with him a bit of a challenge. Sherlock, for all he can be similar isn’t anywhere near as bad imo. 
• Mycroft is not ‘non problematic’ - your fave is very much problematic, especially when viewed through the eyes of the parents. He’s hidden the fact their youngest child is alive from them for years. He’s always on the periphery of Sherlock’s little transgressions with drugs and danger, and I’d put money on him being blamed for them every time. “You should have kept a better eye on him” etc etc. He also gives the impression he has to be dragged kicking and screaming to family events (such as Christmas in His Last Vow, and Les Mis in The Empty Hearse). I’d guess that for all he tries to do the right thing and do his best his parents - especially Mummy - know he’s just going through the motions to try to please them. 
• We actually know next to nothing about what Mycroft was like as a child or teenager. The flashbacks and information we’re given in The Final Problem about their childhood are very much from Mycroft’s perspective, and we know he’s willing to censor or re-tell past events with a different spin. Pretty much all we have to go on is his own version of what happened. For all we know he could have been an absolute nightmare child who drove his parents up the wall. I highly doubt he was, or that he’d be the type to act out for the sake of it, but given his snark and harshness now I can only imagine what a hormone-riddled teenage version would be like. I could imagine him being outright nasty with his tongue at times without even really meaning it – can you imagine the “everybody dies, caring is not an advantage” stuff coming from the mouth of a puberty-raging 12/13 year old? I bet he really did upset Mummy. Several times.
• (Did I mention he’s the eldest and we get blamed for literally everything.)

harriet-spy:

Three other thoughts:

* Parents can take respectable, successful children for granted, especially when there is a more troubled child to focus on. This can cause tensions on all sides. Especially because, unfortunately, people do tend to attribute a higher “value” to the things they’ve been denied, so the child who doesn’t show up just seems more valuable than the child who does. This is a story so old it’s actually Biblical.

* I suspect that Mycroft was a child unresponsive to affection, solitary, self-sufficient in an eerie way. That is genuinely hard on a parent, who ordinarily invests so much of their own love and care in a child and naturally hopes for the child to return it. It takes a particular kindness and strength of character to keep offering that love when it doesn’t seem to be returned, and not everyone has it. (Thinking about it like this is about the only way I can summon up a scrap of empathy for Mummy Holmes in particular.)

* Neither Sherlock nor Mycroft seems to respect their parents. But it’s far more noticeable in Mycroft because Mycroft actually goes through the motions of family gatherings and such. I’m sure at least Mummy knows, and, while she downplays it, as an ex-successful mathematician her ego must be tied to her intelligence to some degree, so I’m sure she’s visited by the occasional “Who do you think you are, you little shit?” thought when Mycroft is condescending.

anarfea:

This. Sherlock, though he can be an arsehole on occasion, is actually pretty motivated by a desire to please people whose validation he craves. I headcanon him as a really affectionate child who was always clamoring for his parents’ attention, Mummy’s especially. And I suspect they almost lost him on a couple of occasions when he was deep into drug use, so that makes them appreciate him more.

Mycroft, [on the other hand], probably wasn’t much trouble as a child (in part because he couldn’t afford to be–Sherlock and Eurus were such handfuls, and it seems like a lot of the work of wrangling them was foisted on Mycroft). But he doesn’t strike me as someone who ever tried to earn his parents’ approval. If he was well-behaved, it was because he’s naturally fastidious, or because he realized adults would treat him more favorably if he behaved as expected, not because of any genuine desire to be “good.” He almost certainly broke whatever rules he thought were pointless when it suited him and he knew he wouldn’t get caught. And Mummy in particular has to at least have suspected that Mycroft was like that and resented him for being two-faced and secretive. And even though he was probably successful in school and later at work, Mycroft isn’t nice. If we look at the Christmas scene and see Mycroft ad Mummy snarking at each other; he seems continually irritated with her and she knows it.

Also, while Mycroft is “successful” in the sense that he has power and money and isn’t a drug addict or a psychopath, I’m not sure that his parents approve of his career. The Final Problem seems to imply that it was Uncle Rudy who got Mycroft involved in shady government work. Mycroft seems to have had a closer relationship to him than to either of his parents, and it’s possible they disapproved. Even if they don’t actively disapprove of his job, they don’t think much of it (or at least Mummy doesn’t):

MRS HOLMES: Mikey, is this your laptop? (Standing at the end of the table, she points down to a silver-grey laptop on the table, half-obscured by a chopping board on top of it which has several whole peeled potatoes and the peelings on it.) 
MYCROFT: On which depends the security of the free world, yes … (he smiles rather sarcastically up at her) … and you’ve got potatoes on it. (Sherlock glances over towards them.)
MRS HOLMES: (to Mycroft) Well, you shouldn’t leave it lying around if it’s so important. [x]

Also, in that scene, Mycroft continually snarks about how very much he hates spending time with the family, “How can it only be two o’clock? I’m in agony.” He doesn’t exactly come off as a dutiful son. Even if he does take them to see Les Mis. It’s gotta be clear to them there are other places he’d rather be.

Which is not to say that Sherlock does any better. He literally pushes his parents out the door in The Empty Hearse because he’s ashamed of them. But they almost lost Sherlock, multiple times. He’s just come back from exile in The Empty Hearse, and then in His Last Vow he gets shot and has just come home from hospital. Mycroft has always been around, and they take him for granted. Possibly they even blame him for Sherlock’s disappearance (what good is his supposedly powerful government job if he wasn’t able to dispatch Moriarty before he could do Sherlock so much harm). And Mycroft isn’t even pleased Sherlock is back. “Am I happy too? I haven’t checked.”

Anyway, Sherlock being the Holmes’ parents favorite child I can totally believe. I know a lot of fanfic shows Mycroft as the favorite, model son and Sherlock as the dysfunctional drug-addict who gets disowned. But the canon doesn’t bear that out I don’t think. What I don’t understand is why Mummy tells Sherlock “you were always the grown-up” at the end of The Final Problem. Because that seems to be completely untrue and I’m sure she knows it. Sherlock is clearly the baby of that family, even if Eurus was younger. The only reason I can think of is that she says it to hurt Mycroft. He has just admitted to concealing her daughter’s death from her.