We can’t pick our family. For better and worse, we are stuck with them. This fact has its good points and its bad points. If a friendship doesn’t work for us anymore, with a little creativity, we can get out of it. We can stop calling, we can get really really busy or we can do a whole bunch of other evasive moves that get the person in question out of our lives. With our family, whether we like them or not, we have to figure out creative ways to make the relationship work.

Figuring out how to do this a great tool for life in the real world. It trains us to get along with annoying or disagreeable co-workers and helps us to learn to be flexible but in the family context it can present a real problem with the children of your siblings.

What do you do if you like one of your nieces or nephews more than another?

In reality, it is possible that some of our nieces or nephews are going to be more on our wavelength than others. If that rings true for you, it will serve you very well to figure out how to deal with this problem in a creative way.

Some solutions:

Don’t feel guilty
Guilt is the thing that we put ourselves through when we want to fool ourselves into thinking that we are doing something about a situation. You have nothing to feel guilty for. Liking one person more than another is totally normal.

Spend more time
Try to get some alone time with the child that you like less. Spending a little extra time on trying to build the relationship can go a long way and you just might develop a connection when you take the time to realty listen.
 
"Fair isn’t always equal"
- and that goes for you too. If you share lots of interests with one child and not another, sometimes in all fairness to you, you have to spend more time with that child and not the child who you don’t connect well with as much.

Be supportive
Make up for the lack of connection in creative ways. If you don’t get a lot out of spending time with your niece or nephew, make up for it by being supportive in other ways- like buying them tickets so that they can go to an event with someone else who shares the same interest or buying them a book about the thing that they are into.

Be honest
Have an open and honest dialog with your siblings and in-laws. Ask them for their input on how to best handle the situation. If you address the problem it will probably go away. If you ignore it, it will be there forever.