Birth Order Is All It’s Cracked Up To Be
Posted by Laurie
As a mom, I take the responsibility of raising my son (and hopefully any future children) to the best of my ability. In terms of how to parent our child, my husband and I have delved into theories of discipline (apparently “positive discipline” wins out), healthy eating and building character. With all our preparation, we overlooked the big elephant in the room: Birth order.
At a recent mommy and me class, the well-trained parent educator explained that first-born kids receive their parents’ undistracted attention and loads of praise. The impact: they go through life seeking perfection and approval of their teachers, bosses and everyone else. A first-born is the kid who would never imagine going to his fourth grade science class without having done his homework. This can be a good thing: First-borns are more likely to attend college than children in any other position in the family. New research discussed in Scientific American Mind shows a correlation between birth order and IQ (first-borns are smarter). But, birth order can also be a bad thing: first-borns tend to be bossy, controlling, needy of attention and self-centered.
And what about younger children? In general they are the risk-takers, while first-borns play by the rules. The younger children tend to be more creative and easygoing. The parent educator explained: While the first-born kid leads the game by setting the rules for playing pretend house, the younger child goes along with everything, adding his own creative flare along the way. (By the way, she also said that when the younger child is more than four years younger than the next older sibling, that younger child takes on first-born characteristics).
Now these labels are certainly not true for everyone, but for the “typical” family (whatever that means), they seem to be accurate. Time magazine did a feature (The Power of Birth Order) highlighting the hard evidence that backs up the idea of the smart, bossy older sibling and the artsy, riskier younger sibling.
And how should this affect my parenting? How can I interact with my son so that he is not desperate for attention? Should I thwart my desire to clap when he successfully counts to ten? Should I refuse to hang his very poorly done art projects on the refrigerator? And if and when I have a second child, should I initiate games and let my younger child set the rules? What I’d like is for my son to have the leadership traits of a first-born, and the creative, easygoing nature of a second child. But, then again, is that a contradiction of personality?
One great piece of advice from the parent educator was that we should avoid using birth order as an expectation, as in, “you’re the older one here, you should know better!” They should both know better, shouldn’t they? And we shouldn’t let our younger child get away with things we would not have accepted from our older child. For now, that’s all I have to go on. Do you have any advice?
How did birth order play out in your family? Is it affecting your parenting style? Do you think there is anything parents can do to counteract the negative aspects of birth order?
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.
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