TOTALLY GEEKED!

Source: YouTubeVideo/Fair Use

If you ask most parents if they try to treat all of their children equally and fairly, you will be greeted by a look akin to what you might receive if you had asked them which one of their children they planned to cook for dinner tonight.  Anyone who has had more than one child knows the contortions one goes through to balance the number of Christmas presents, the opulence of birthday parties, and so on in an effort preserve the appearance of not playing favorites.

Source: Frank McAndrew

Having said this, I wish to raise the indelicate question of whether such even-handedness is possible, or even if it desirable in the long run.  I will tackle the question of whether it is possible in this essay, and then pursue the question of whether or not it is an optimal strategy for the parents to pursue in another essay.

Let me begin.

Imagine a hypothetical family, and imagine that the colored space inside the circles in this article represent everything that the parents have to invest in their children.  By “investment,” I mean time, money, energy, and any other resources that a parent can give to a child.  Let’s also assume that this hypothetical family gives birth to five children, evenly spaced with one birth every two years.  For the sake of the argument, let’s also assume that the children grow up, leave the family, and stop extracting resources from the parents in exactly the same order at two-year intervals later in life.  I fully understand that things do not work this cleanly in real life, but let’s go with this for the sake of making my point, and I do not think that the artificiality of the example disrupts the logic of the argument.

Source: Frank McAndrew

The yellow circle represents the first two years of the first-born child’s life, where he or she enjoys the full benefit of the parents’ undivided investment.  The second circle, split evenly between the blue and yellow, represents the parents’ valiant attempts at fairness in dividing everything 50/50 between their two children.

Some of you are already seeing the problem here.  Even if the parents can successfully manage an exactly even split, what about the undivided two full years that the first-born has already received?  This was a head start of bankable resources that the second born will never make up.

The situation gets even worse as more children come into the family.  Follow the chain of circles down the page and notice how with each new birth, each child receives a smaller share of the wealth, and each new child starts out with a smaller share than the child born previously carried for two years.

Source: Frank McAndrew

Now, notice what happens as children begin to leave the family.  As each child leaves, the remaining siblings receive a larger share of the pie.  However, there are only two children (the first-born and the last-born) who can ever lay claim to the whole enchilada.

I grew up in a family of five children.  Only two of the five finished college, acquired advanced degrees, and permanently moved out of the area where we grew up: The first-born and the last-born. A coincidence? Perhaps, but it certainly fits the predicted pattern.

So, who gets screwed here? The middle children, of course, and the more middle they are, the more desperate their situations.  Yes, the baby of the family starts out with the smallest share of the investment, but it never gets worse after that and it will grow over time.

There are in fact studies that show that first-borns tend to get more of their parents’ time and last-borns tend to get more of their parents’ money compared to other children, and that middle-borns report less emotional closeness to parents on average than their siblings at the extremes of the birth order.

Source: Frank McAndrew

I want to again acknowledge that I have made this sound more straightforward than it actually is, and the effects depend upon factors such as the gender and neediness of the children, the actual time lapse between births, and a host of other things.  I will also anticipate that readers of this essay will be able to think of many exceptions to the rule I have just described.  Try to keep in mind, however, that one is rarely objective in evaluating the fairness of one’s own outcomes.

In summary, I have tried to make the case that a parent’s best effort at complete equity and fairness is doomed to fail by forces outside of the parent’s control.  In a future essay, I will address the even stickier issue of whether or not parents do in fact strive for equity, or if there is a an inherent advantage accruing to those who play favorites.