In some families, children are handed roles that serve the parent rather than describing the child. The golden child carries the parent's pride and receives approval on condition of reflecting well. The scapegoat carries the family's blame and failure. Neither role is earned, both can be reassigned without warning, and both cost the child the same thing — a self that belongs to them rather than to the family.
In a functioning family, children get described. In this kind of family, children get cast. The difference is that a description follows the child and a casting decision precedes them. One child becomes the proof that the parent is admirable. Another becomes the explanation for everything that goes wrong. The roles are handed out early, often before anybody could have known what these children were actually like, and then everyone spends years gathering evidence to support the assignment they were given.
This is why arguing about accuracy never gets anywhere. The scapegoat can produce a long list of achievements and be told they are showing off. The golden child can behave appallingly and have it explained away in real time. The roles are not conclusions drawn from behavior. They are jobs, and the household needs them filled, because a parent who cannot tolerate being at fault requires somewhere for fault to live and somewhere for pride to live. Two children, two containers. It is functional for the parent and expensive for everyone else.
Being the favorite sounds like a good deal until you look at the terms. The golden child is not loved for who they are; they are valued for what they reflect. Approval is real, warm, and abundant, and it is conditional on continuing to be a credit. That produces a child who performs superbly and privately has no idea what they would want if nobody were watching. It also produces a strange kind of loneliness, because being adored for a function is not the same as being known, and the golden child usually cannot say that out loud without sounding ungrateful.
The scapegoat holds everything the family cannot admit about itself. When money is tight, when a marriage is failing, when a parent is humiliated at work, the tension has to discharge somewhere, and it discharges onto the child designated to receive it. Often this is the child who noticed too much and said so — the one who asked why, who did not perform gratitude convincingly, who reacted visibly instead of learning to go quiet. Being blamed for a family's troubles is not evidence of having caused them. Frequently it is evidence of having refused to pretend.
There is often a third child who is neither, and their strategy is to be unnoticeable. No trouble, no demands, no needs presented to anyone. They stay out of the crossfire by taking up as little space as possible, and because they never caused a problem, nobody in the family remembers them having a hard time — including, sometimes, them. The cost lands later, as adults who cannot ask for anything, cannot tell when they are upset, and feel obscurely guilty for claiming they were affected at all when the shouting was always aimed elsewhere.
If you want proof the roles were never about the children, watch what happens when one of them stops cooperating. The golden child marries someone the parent dislikes, sets a boundary, gets divorced, gets ill, fails publicly — and the warmth turns off. Almost immediately the family needs a new golden child, and the position gets offered to someone else, sometimes to the former scapegoat, who may find the sudden approval more disorienting than the years of blame. Roles that can be reassigned in a weekend were never assessments of anybody's worth. They were staffing decisions.
Adult siblings often try to talk about their childhood and end up further apart than when they started. That is not usually because one of them is lying. They grew up in the same house and in genuinely different families. The golden child's memories of a warm, funny, generous parent are real memories. So are the scapegoat's. Asking the favored sibling to confirm your account is asking them to give up the only version of that parent they ever got, and to look squarely at what they benefited from. Many people cannot do that, or cannot do it yet, and waiting for it can cost you years.
Yes, and saying so does not diminish what the scapegoat went through. The golden child was used, praised on condition, and denied a separate self. The scapegoat was blamed, isolated, and often had far less support. These are different injuries with different consequences, and neither one cancels the other. What tends to poison the sibling relationship is being asked to agree on which of them was worse.
Because wanting a parent's approval is not a belief you can talk yourself out of. It formed before you had language and it does not update when the facts do. Understanding what happened and still feeling the pull are entirely compatible, and the pull tends to spike at exactly the moments you would least choose — illness, holidays, becoming a parent. That is not backsliding. It is what old attachment does.
You are unlikely to win that argument, and the attempt usually costs more than it returns. You can hold your account without requiring them to endorse it. Some siblings come around years later, often after the parent turns on them; some never do. Decide separately what relationship you want with that sibling as they are now, rather than making it conditional on them validating your version.