Our Town: Birth order has big impact on your personality

Dr Tom Ferraro
Born first, in the middle or last has a big affect on who you are

“Mom always liked you best!” The Smothers Brothers capitalized on that little sibling problem and their skits were hysterical. Poor Tommy Smothers was always being beaten and outsmarted by older brother Dick.

We take for granted that we’ve been raised in a family and acknowledge that mothers and fathers have had a profound influence on our development. But, what is less commonly understood is the way that our siblings have determined who we are. The Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges all worked together and the world laughed long and hard as they smacked each other around, but how often have you heard anyone talk about how siblings influence our personality? Not too often I suspect.

The first guy to discuss birth order was Alfred Adler, one of the co-founders of psychoanalysis, and he developed his theory of birth order back at the beginning of the 20th century. He suggested that the place you had in your family had a big impact. Here is how Adler analyzed birth order:

The Firstborn: Adler believed that the oldest sibling is the most dominant, feels the most responsibility, and pressure and is often the most neurotic and depressed in the family. They are the ones who are more likely to end up in an asylum. Research has also shown that firstborns are the brightest in the family. That is certainly true in my family. I was the middle child in my family and grew up thinking I was mentally deficient since my older brother was so smart. He was the one who got all the scholarships and all the academic awards.

The Middle Child: The middle child is thought to have feelings of inferiority, becomes attention seeking, is highly competitive, feels unloved and never gets enough attention. I must say that describes me well. But the good news about being a middle child is that they are often the ones who benefit from what the older siblings teach them. My older brother, not my teachers, introduced me to writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henry Miller and he was the one who took me to museums when I was younger. Middle children often seek out paths different from their older siblings and are the ones who tend to be the most successful in the family.

The Youngest Child: The youngest sibling is usually described as the least responsible, most spoiled and most indulged. They are often the most fun, charming, social and outgoing. My family is proof of that with my youngest sibling being chock full of charisma and social grace. Everyone wants to be around this guy. I recall that we once went shopping for some clothes for his two girls and remember how all the sales girls buzzed around him like bees to honey. And I felt like Mr. Invisible. Yes, indeed, my younger brother David has charm plus.

It is of interest that all the hard science research fails to support much of these findings, but I think that isn’t because birth order is meaningless but more because the research is weak and not yet sensitive enough to measure these things. It makes sense that siblings have a big impact because they are the ones we spend so much time with as we grow up. In the family we all vie for parental love and approval and actually go to great lengths to get some. When I was a kid, I realized that we had a big family of seven and I once asked my mother the question that all kids either ask or think about:

“Hey, Mom, Do you have any favorites in the family?”

Kind of like what Tommy Smothers would shout to Dick, “Mom always liked you best!” My mother was a sly one and she cleverly answered, “Oh, Tommy, my love is like a big apple pie and I cut up the pieces equally between all of you. Everyone gets exactly the same size slice.” Somehow I never really believed that.

But my question gets to the point Alfred Adler was consumed by: What goes on in the family? I think children will go to great lengths to gain the attention from parents and will go even further to differentiate themselves from their siblings. We all want a bigger piece of the pie don’t you think?

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