TOTALLY GEEKED!

Everybody knows that first, second and third born children have particularpersonality characteristics determined by their position in the family: firstborns are achievers, middle children are peacemakers, and the babies in the family are individualists. Influential books like Frank Sulloway’s Born to Rebel(1996) and Jeffrey Kluger’s The Sibling Effect: Brothers, Sisters, and the Bonds That Define Us (2011) say so. Thesestereotypes are so much a part of our consciousness that I recently got a jokey Christmas catalogue with models on the cover sporting t-shirts proclaiming “I’m the Oldest/ I Make the Rules,” “I’m the Middle/I’m the Reason We Had Rules,” and “I’m the Youngest/The Rules Don’t Apply to Me,” with the caption, “Wear it proud because it’s the truth!”

There’s only one problem: it isn’t. A major study recently reported in the science section ofThe New York Times (“Don’t Blame it On Birth Order”) demonstrates conclusively that, contrary to what those t-shirts take for granted and most psychologists consider gospel, “birth order itself has no effect on character.”

The researchers of this head-clearing investigation—the lead author was Julia Rohrer at the University of Leipzig, and the original results were reported in the journal PNAS(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)—used an enormous database that drew on three major international studies including more than 20,000 people. They looked for differences in everything you can think of and then some—extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, self-reported intellect, IQ, imagination and openness to experience. They analyzed data on brothers, sisters, small and large age gaps, and different family sizes. “But,” the article states, “no matter how they spliced the data, they could find no association of birth order with any personality characteristic.” The only detectable effect was that older children have very slightly higher IQ scores, but that may well be an artifact of the large sample size. The lead author concludes, categorically, “There is no such thing as a typical older, middle or younger sibling.”

Why, then, do so many people swear by a phenomenon that does not exist? Because they want it to be true. We find comfort in patterns that seem to make rational sense—patterns that are generalizable and predictable, and birth order seems to answer complex and mysterious questions about the origins of personality and the role of family dynamics in shaping who we are. It’s easier to seek explanations in superficial qualities, to focus on the outside rather than the inside. But when we look more closely, we see that every family, and every member of a family, is unique.

If birth order is irrelevant as a general explanation, what really determines family dynamics? A combination of the personality traits and genders of the particular children who occupy each ordinal position—and the meaning attributed to these characteristics by their parents. Parents consciously or unconsciously assign specific roles to each child based on the own childhood sibling experience, and how they were perceived and treated by their own parents. This hidden factor contributes to the enormous variation the researchers uncovered. The role of the past, including events that occurred before people were even born, is potent but largely overlooked because of its subtlety and complexity.

When I give talks about siblings—I’ve written two books on the subject, and treating “normal” siblings of the disabled and dysfunctional is my therapeutic specialty—someone always asks about birth order. I respond by telling the following incident that happened in my own extended family:

A distant cousin of mine has always been bitterly estranged from both her mother and her sister, who is ten years older. When I asked why, she told me that her mother had installed a dog gate on her teenage daughter’s door to prevent the toddler from bothering her. The teenager tortured her baby sister by taking her beloved stuffed animals and refusing to return them, and her mother turned a blind eye to this, never punishing the culprit or comforting the victim. How, I wondered, could this otherwise caring mother, whom I knew, do something like that, something guaranteed to estrange her daughters from each other, and the younger one from her?

My cousin knew why. “She had been a teenager herself when a new baby was born, and this baby was shamelessly favored over her and allowed to get away with murder,” she explained. Her mother, when she had children herself, unconsciously vowed to right this wrong in the next generation, and bent over backward to compensate her own teenage daughter for what she herself had suffered at her own mother’s hands. Of course, the plan backfired horribly; instead of righting this wrong, she created its mirror image.

One size never fits all.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-last-taboos/201511/birth-order-determinesalmost-nothing