Last week was Anton’s birthday; he’s officially become a teenager at the age of 13. I was thinking about the differences between my two children and how the way they have been at similar ages differs so greatly at times. Part of that is having a girl and a boy, but birth order also plays a role.
There has been a lot of research into birth order and what it means. It’s a little scary when I was researching some of this just how spot on it seems. It’s certainly not exact for every child born in a particular birth order spot, but I thought a lot about my own kids as well as my own experiences growing up, and it was frighteningly accurate.
I am the oldest of four children born to my parents. I’ve often joked over the years that Mom and Dad weren’t quite sure what they were doing with me since everything was a first experience. But that tends to be true. Parents are either flying by the seat of their pants as they encounter new trials and tribulations or they are going right out of some book they read about how to raise children. I’m pretty sure my parents were the make it up as they go variety.
Parents do tend to pay more attention to all the little things, especially when the oldest child is the only child. Research shows that this can cause those children to lean more toward perfectionism since the parents notice all the minutiae early on. First-born kids also tend to be more structured and become achievers. Time as a young child is very structured when you’re the only one, and every ribbon or trophy is the first of its kind for your family.
Here’s something interesting about oldest children and achievement. Harvard and Yale have a preponderance of first-borns. Every astronaut that has gone into space has been either the oldest child or the oldest boy. More than half of all U.S. presidents and Nobel Prize winners have been the eldest in their family.
When you get to the middle child or children, the research shows them as being more people-pleasing along with having a streak of rebelliousness while also playing peacemaker. Not being the oldest often means you have to compete for that attention from parents and other relatives, so you either do what is necessary to make people happy or do something to get noticed that might not be so positive. You might also find youself in the middle of arguments once there are at least three kids in your family.
I think about my two sisters who fall in this category, and they each take on some of those traits. Kim will work hard to please others and try to step in and create the peace. She would do that when we were growing up and I’d get in a fight with our sister Angie. Angie tended to have a little more rebelliousness in her, but she’s in a unique situation since she was the youngest child for a long time before Mandy was born, so I see some traits of that area in her as well.
Youngest children are shown as being the most outgoing and fun-loving while also being manipulative. They seek attention more than others. And let’s face it, by the time parents get to their last child, they’re exhausted. They have a number of kids running around the house and are trying to keep up with burgeoning schedules and hormones. At times it may seem as if those parents have just given up when it comes to the youngest, so that child is forced to do things to get some of that attention that is pulled from so many directions.
Sometimes it seems as if the youngest, especially when there are three or more children in a family, gets whatever he or she wants. Mom and Dad are done with arguing and are just plain tired. Fine, do that activitiy, take that money, just leave us to sit on the couch for a while!
My other sisters and I always joked that Mandy always got whatever she wanted, being the youngest. She’d get a cookie at the store, something we’d given up on asking for by about age six. She got to do this, that, and the other that we’d never even dreamed of. Is there something wildly accurate about all the research? Maybe.
And when we grow up into adults, do we retain those qualities? Quite often the answer is yes. We also change and develop based on our interactions with others, especially including our spouses. We might change a bit as we raise our own children, but I bet many of us can identify qualities we have that have been with us most of our lives. We can likely also see that we parent much as we were parented!
Or maybe we just imagine these things. Maybe the research doesn’t really mean much. Maybe. But this research has been going on longer than I’ve been alive, so I think it might have some sliver of truth. Either way, love all your children and accept them for who they are, regardless of when they were born!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is bavardage, which means chattering or gossip, as in, “The oldest child ignored the bavardage, trying to stay focused on the task at hand.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!