I’ve always been glad I was the oldest child in my family. There are any number of reasons for this, but the strongest one is that my parents followed me with three girls. I shudder at the thought of being the youngest in some alternate universe.
Being the oldest always gave me a few advantages. Realistically, parents are making it up as they go along with the first child. You can read all the books you want, but with the many contradictions you find among the so-called experts, who’s to know what to believe? As the oldest child, I can look back and feel like I had a few “Get out of jail free” cards that I was able to play since Mom and Dad hadn’t anticipated a situation.
My sisters followed me and might not have had the same luck. Our parents had most likely figured out a few of my tricks by that time, so those didn’t work for my siblings. They had to come up with some new strategies to get away with things.
Now don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I was some rapscallion who was nothing but trouble. But I did manage to finagle my way out of some tricky situations and even to herd the blame in the direction of one of my sisters if I was especially on my game. (Sorry, Kim, about you getting blamed for taking all those cookies.)
I recently read an article in Parade about the impact of siblings on each other. We all have heard about how birth order is thought to affect how we turn out with labels given to the oldest, the middle child, and the baby of the family. However, this article went deeper. Apparently, the oldest child in a family is, according to this study, the most intelligent.
Well. I’ve admitted to my ego relating to my intellect. And now I have proof!
Regardless of who has the biggest brain, I know I always used to lord my intelligence over my sisters. I may have set a treacherous standard as I went through school by getting good grades in everything except handwriting. (Psh! Who cares about that anyway?)
As a teacher, I know better than to judge a student based on an older sibling, luckily for some! Still, there’s always something in the back of your head that tells you, “Wow, he/she is not nearly as bright as the older one!” or the opposite.
I sometimes feel bad that my sisters may have faced a “Mark prejudice.” I know my sister Kim, who is only two years younger than me, worked her tail off through school. Even if her GPA wasn’t the same as mine at the end of high school, she had a clear advantage in college. She had learned that strong work ethic with homework, whereas I had many things come easy to me. That came to a screeching halt in college, and Kim had an easier time than I did because of it.
That article also talked about what an impact the oldest child has on younger siblings, whether conscious or not. Younger children look up to the oldest and see what he/she is doing and often pattern things after that.
Okay, let’s go with that. I’m a teacher. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was a freshman in high school. Kim’s husband was a teacher when they got married. My sister Angie is a teacher. Oh oh, maybe it’s true!
Oh, wait. Then there’s Mandy. She’s the baby of the family, and if you go with traditional birth order theories, she fits them to a tee. The baby of the family is often spoiled, and even Mandy will admit to getting more of what she wanted than we did.
The youngest child is supposedly also more of a rebel and a wild child. Check. Check. Mandy may not have any connection to education, but then I wasn’t around for long after she was born before I headed out of town. Mandy has always forged her own path, currently shown by her occupation as a mortician and her “hobby” of playing women’s tackle football with the Minnesota Vixen.
It’s tough for all of our schedules to mesh these days, so the rare occasions when Mom and Dad have all four kids in one place are worth celebrating: we’ve all turned out pretty well!
In the end, no matter how much influence I may or may not have had on my sisters, I’m still glad I was the oldest. I would rather have staged wrestling matches with their dolls than had them make me play along with them!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is longueur, which means a long, tedious passage or selection, as in, “The columnist hoped his readers didn’t feel as if they were reading a longueur when he dabbled in articles about his family.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!