Does birth order determine your personality?

The conventional wisdom is that birth order has a formative effect on a child's personality, but how does science weigh in? Cristen and Molly explore what studies and anecdotal evidence suggest about birth order and personality in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told You?
From housetop works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen, I'm Molly. Molly. I gotta say,

(00:21):
I think one of the reasons why you and I
have a get along so well, I guess some good,
good chemistry. If I may say that, you may, I
think it's because you know, you're an oldest sibling and
I'm the youngest sibling, and it's I think, you know,
it's just a good yin and yang made to be

(00:41):
because I'm so bossy and authoritative as first sibling stereotypes
would have it. So I tell you, like, yes, Kristen,
this is what we're talking about. Yeah, you you reign
in my natural tendencies to rebel as the youngest child,
and and I teach you to have fun once in
a while, you really do. Yeah, I'm as you, like,
just have more fun. Yeah, come on, mollways shake you

(01:03):
a little bit, and I'm like, no, Kristen, it's time
to work, And like, yeah, I'm so driven, that's true.
And I'm thinking about all this, Molly, because today we're
talking about birth order and personality. I ran across this
recent article and Scientific American asking the question does birth
order affect your personality? And I was surprised to find

(01:23):
how much research has gone into answering this question. Yeah,
and I really enjoyed um researching this because we spend
a lot of time. I think I think parents do
about how you can just screw your kid up if
you breastfeed or don't breastfeed, or daycare don't take care.
But I think what's cool is it's possible that you

(01:44):
could screw them up just by the order that you
birth your kids. Yeah. But luckily I'm a firstborn, so
I like to think that I got a pretty good
shake out things. But not according to Alfred Adler. And
I think we got to talk about Adler because he
was really one of the first major proponents of this
birth order theory. He was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud,

(02:05):
and he thought that actually middle children had the easiest,
which is a complete opposite of the stereotype today. Right now,
it's it's worth noting, though, that Alfred Adler was a
middle born child, so I think that that might have
had something to do with why he uh gave middle
born children a pass um. But I think that before
you you have, before you understand how Adler ranks birth

(02:28):
order and it's and it's characteristics, you have to know
that all of his theories of personality are based on
the idea that we all just feel inferior all the time. Yeah,
we're basically come out of the womb with a total
inferiority complex, right, And so for a firstborn child, you get,
you know, a few years of attention, you're at the
center of your parents eyes and the world, and then

(02:49):
all of a sudden, a long come sibling number two.
And that's when you know, for the rest of your life,
poor firstborn child is going to have to recover from
that inferiority of knowing that someone else has come to you,
surved them. And I mean, I remember that's how I
felt when my second my first brother came along. The
second sibling. Were you a little little angry? I mean,

(03:10):
I don't remember being angry, But now that I've read Adler,
I'm going to pretend that I am and use it
against my parents at some opportune moment about how they
really just screwed me up by having that second child. Well,
at least you're not the youngest like me, because according
to Adler, um, I've always been very aware of the
little amount of power that I hold in my family.

(03:30):
And uh so I always have personality problems that I'm
grappling with because of that, and I feel really alone
in the world and feel like I'm always going to
be inferior to other people. Yeah, I think you feel
in very because you have so many people taking care
of you that you never learned how to do things
on your own. That's right. And I guess that's why
Christmas always asked me to go to the bathroom with her,

(03:51):
like she just can't walk there by herself. I mean,
it's it's a long walk. I mean, you think it's
just because girls always go the bathroom together, because because
I'm the youngest of five. Um. But again, like we said, Adler,
middle born children just do great because they aren't as
pampered as the firstborn, so they don't lose, um, that
sense of pampering. They can't get that sense of inferiority
from that. Um if they still have power over someone

(04:14):
people like um. So Adler is the one person who
gives a middle born child a good fair shake. But
everyone else, um, and all these studies that have been
done since then says poor middle children. They are the
lost souls. As one article put it, entirely neglected. They
just don't know whether to strive to match their older

(04:34):
sibling or to rebel like their younger sibling. I mean,
it's they get the worst deal. They have a gene Brady's. Yeah.
When Chris and I were discussing doing this podcast, the
one thing we could agree on was that no one
wants to be jam Those Cindy kind of sucked me
a little bit. I'm okay with being a marsha. Uh
never mind, But enough about the Brady bunch, Kristen, Let's

(04:56):
just go through all the weird stereotypes. You've alluded to
a few of them, but let's go through all the
weird things that studies have found, um that different birth
order children achieve or don't achieve. One thing I was
really surprised of from a Journal of Psychology article. I
was going through all the literature, reviewing all the different
things that have been found. One thing I was surprised

(05:16):
to find is that a firstborn I'm likely to recall
fewer dreams. It's too bad because I remember lots of
my dreams. Molly. Well, studies haven't shown that lastborn children
do that. Though you do score high on exhibition I
am quite quite the exhibitionist, not really. Um. Unfortunately, I
don't know how I rank with my peers, because studies

(05:38):
have alternately found that firstborn are more popular with their
peers and less popular with their peers. Yeah. A lot
of these kind of do end up with conflicting personality traits,
where like I think for younger children were very independent,
but we're also dependent at the same same time. Um,
I apparently experienced a lot of psych psychiatric disorders and anxieties,

(05:59):
but had told you that, Molly. Yeah, I'm sure my
mother would have something to say about that too. But
luckily I have higher i Q scores and will achieve
higher professional status than you. This was one study on
birth order, personality and religion that found that middle children
are the most likely to be non religious. Yeah, it's
because what is it? They just don't have any values, right,

(06:20):
because they're so alone in the wilderness, not knowing where
they stand. Um. I liked one article that pointed out
that people like Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marks, and Fidel Castro
were all younger brothers, and that it was that rebellious
streak that all these last porn children have that led
them to overthrow countries and think that they could just
rebel in that way. And the story on contrasted President

(06:43):
Carter and President Clinton with their younger brothers who were
kind of wildcats. I think Carter the youngest. Carter had
a beer making business and Roger Clinton was Yeah, so um.
There are tons of famous examples that both proved stereotype
and dispute stereotypes. Usually you look for the ones that
match up with what you what you think you should be,

(07:06):
things that show that birth order is just great for
you and sucks for everyone else. But generally all these
studies are pretty discredited. Yeah, studying birth order is pretty
difficult because you have so many different factors that are
going to affect just family dynamics in general, such as
in my case family size. Right, I'm the youngest of five,

(07:29):
the youngest of two different scenario, right, And that was
something that was pointed in this Scientific American Mind article
you're talking about. Earlier, there was the statistic that one
of the first twenty three astronauts for firstborns. So you're like, oh,
the firstborns get that extra boost from their parents early
on a life that gives them that extra boost to
go into space. But the fact is, if you are
in a family of two, you put a fifty chance

(07:52):
of being a firstborn, whereas poor Christin Conger only had
a twenty percent chance. That was old Christen Conger rebelling
by using our new sound effects toy, just acting out
just like a just like a good lastborn childhood. So
in addition to family size, we also have things like
socioeconomic status. Obviously, the resources that you can give to

(08:16):
your children are going to be partially determined by wealth
and parents education levels and how old they were when
you first when they first started having children. Um and
now especially today we've got plendid families. Are there step siblings?
Where do they fit in on birth order? If you
adopt a sibling, do they come in and fit in

(08:37):
in terms of socially, how they came into the family,
in terms of age or biologically if they're already older
than the firstborn, does everyone shift roles and also gender roles.
I mean a lot of these studies don't differentiate between
boys and girls, or even how maybe parents few boys
and girls and what kind of roles they think a
boy or a girl should play Like. I mean, I

(08:58):
can't imagine if I had four older sisters, I would
probably be a bit different than the person I am
now who has two sisters and two brothers. Right, And
I don't have any sisters, right, So what if I
had had a sister and growing up fighting with her?
What I have brought that sort of dynamic to like
this relationship Christian exactly? Questions will never know the answer,

(09:18):
will never know the answer to. But I stop scientists
from trying. Yeah, and and the Scientific American article points
out that since a lot of these studies over the
years really haven't controlled for all these different factors, it
has been pretty hard to conclusively say yes or no
to this birth order conundrum. Yes, I think one article
I read compared it to astrology that sometimes when you

(09:39):
see a person that fits, um, you know, a stereotype,
you know, being a Gemini, you'll say, oh, that's so Gemini.
And when you see a firstborn that's some stereotype at
firstborn behavior, like that's so firstborn. So everything has been
taken with a grain of salt. But I would say
that in the past few decades we are starting to
see maybe a turn in that people are trying to
take this a little bit more seriously, trying to really

(10:00):
come to some conclusive UM data without having these extraneous
factors affected. And one guy I think we need to
turn to at this point is man named Frank Stilaway,
who wrote the book Born to Rebel in the mid
nineties UM and he took a novel approach to this
birth order question by applying the evolutionary psychology lens, a

(10:24):
controversial lens, but an interesting lens, no less um. And
he's saying that parents have limited resources to divide among
their children, and that your personality is probably more affected
by how many how much of these resources you get. Yeah,
and he's saying that younger children like me tend to
rebel because we don't get all of the resources that um,

(10:47):
the older siblings did when our parents didn't have to
divide their time among multiple children. So that's how you're
trying to get attention, Like everyone has to feel a
niche because if you're just like your brother or sister,
then you might get were looked. When it comes time
to divide up the resources, would you pluve things just
like time spent together, monetary things like you know, I
was reading that middle children are less likely to be

(11:10):
sent to private schools than their older siblings, so things
like that, like how can you get your parents attention
to get some form of these resources that will set
you up better later in life? Yeah, And he also
says that second born children tend to be exposed to
less language than the older child, which again makes sense.
I mean, it's all about time and resources. And he

(11:31):
says the best environment is really if you just have
two parents who are constantly just talking to you, and
all their attention is focused just on you, right, Whereas
when you're the second born, you might be spending time
with your your baby sibling who can't really talk. But
I would argue, you know, I had I had four
four kids chattering away around me, but you're a last one. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

(11:52):
You had more people who knew how to talk, whereas
I had just my parents, and my poor middle brother
was stuck with like me, he could probably kind of
talk when he came around, and parents who had to
divide their attention. But Molly. According to a Norwegian study,
you still got the better end of the deal in
terms of i Q. I did well. Now Norway. This

(12:13):
is the study that comes up all the time and
all these arc was read about birth order. This two
thousand to stay that was done in Norway about i
Q and birth order. And yes, according to this I
would have got the better end of the deal because
an oldest born child had an i Q those three
points higher than um the next sibling, and you as
the last sibling, would have really suffered because it said

(12:33):
for the greater number of siblings you have, the lesser
you're i Q. It was sort of proportional way to go, Kristen. However,
there is a problem with this study. I mean, it's
a large study, two or fifty thousand Norwegian soldiers that
they that they looked at for this data. And that's

(12:54):
why it gets so much credibility is it was such
a large, very large, very comprehensive but only men, only men.
So it's not the greatest maybe study to cite on
mom stuff. And it was in Norway. I mean, they
think they can extrapolate this data to the United States,
but who knows. It could be cultural difference as these
were all men who had joined the military, exactly, because

(13:14):
you have to take into account cultural factors. You know,
perhaps in Norway, sons are more prized and valued than daughters,
whereas in the US, maybe there's more of a tendency
to pour your resources into the girls in the family.
I mean, they're all these factors that can go into
how kids are treated on an individual basis, right. I mean,
for every study so far, there's been an asterisk that

(13:36):
says exclusions may apply. But there is one study that
kind of attempted to eliminate all those asterisks that started
to stay in the plural form uh. And this was
a study that was published last year in the journal
and by last I mean two thousand nine UH in
the Journal of Genetic Psychology that tried to control for

(13:59):
all these different factors that we've been talking about and
really assess whether or not birth order has an impact
on the big five personality traits, which are molly, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeable nous, neuroticism. And they looked at things like how

(14:21):
spread out the family was, like age distribution, maternal relationships,
blended families, blended families, social versus biological order. And they
were starting with the assumption that Sullaway's work of evolutionary
um psychology affecting birth order was valid. So what they
want to do is say, Okay, if this holds true,

(14:44):
then we should be able to code for all of
these differences. And the coding section of this paper it
takes quite a while to read, but you are left
thinking with yes, they must have accounted for every single
difference that affects all these other studies. Um, So they
code for all the differences and then match birth order
to these big five personality traits. Now, before you know
you come up with the results. You might think that

(15:05):
a first born be more conscientious, for example, a middle
child would be more agreeable because they just want to
get along with everyone, and the last born might be
more extroverted because they're there butte. So that that's sort
of the general thought of what you might find once
you match all these birth orders accounting for all the
extra factors. But that's not what they found. They found nothing. Yeah,

(15:27):
they found quote no evidence of birth order's role and
personality or identity formation. So good news, parents, you can't
screw up your kids just by the order you have them. However, Molly,
this argument still isn't closed and ever be Yeah. Not.
According to Joshua Ka Harsham from the Scientific America article
that we've referenced a couple of times, because he says,

(15:49):
not so fast, he and some colleagues found evidence that
birth order influences who you choose as friends or spouses.
Basically that middles are drawn to middles, last borns to
last borns, etcetera. So he says, if that's the case,
then there has to be some kind of personality correlation, right,
because we usually marry people that we are very similar

(16:10):
to personality wise. So if my personality is in fact
affected by being a firstborn, if I marry another first born,
then yes, there must be something there, which kind of
brings us to where we started Kristen, in terms of
who was most compatible with who we think for podcasting purposes,
oldest and youngest works pretty well. Yeah, And funny story, Molly,
one of my best friends is not only the youngest

(16:34):
of five like you like me, she is also the
youngest of five and the same family distribution in terms
of uh number of brothers and sisters two sisters, two brothers,
and very far spacing between the youngest and the oldest.
It was uncanny. So you think this guy's were a castimbility,
that you had a very good friendship with someone who

(16:56):
had the exact same family layout that you did. Thus
there's something to this personality. Well, I mean, I'm an
example of it, but it could also be the same
thing that we we noted earlier, where the one of
the authors just said, well, it's just basically like astrology.
You know, you find something that correlates to your your
son and suddenly you're a gentleman destined to be. Well,
let's just for a minute pretend it's not astrology, because

(17:19):
we found some pretty interesting stuff worth a good giggle
on I Village. Now that's not normally one of our sources.
It's not not i would say known for its scholarly
um reputation. Yeah, but when if you put in if
you start to put in birth order in Google, it's
going to automatically fill in birth order love match. And

(17:39):
I couldn't resist not clicking on that, and so came
to um this really handy page on birth order and
uh love matches, which I mean, I'm going to use
it now to guide all my future romantic pursuit. Apparently
my new pickup line needs to be, hey, young man,
have any older sisters, because apparently I will do very

(18:01):
well as an older sister with m a male youngest
child who has older sisters himself. Now, I will just
reasoning for this is that because I'm an eldest child
and a sister, I will likely have great maternal urges.
And the young man, on the other hand, will have
grown up with all these girls taking care of him
and doating on him, and he's gonna want the same

(18:21):
and a wife, and thus the best match is an
oldest sister and the youngest male. Now you can start
to see some of the fallacies that are going to
come in with this, because I do not have any
maternal urges as a result of being the eldest child
that I know of, so I don't know how I
would do with a young man who's seeking that. But
all the same, it's it's an interesting pickup line. Yeah,
I think I'm supposed to be on the lookout for

(18:43):
either an oldest oldest sibling Molly or an only child. Um.
But the worst family blend evidently is an only child
female to an only child male. Because quote, not only
will they butt heads, but neither will have much of
a clue about the other gender. Interesting, now, Chris, and
luckily neither you nor I have to worry about the
only child female only child male situation. But I will

(19:04):
just say that I cannot marry apparently another firstborn too
much friction, and you should not marry another lastborn because um,
it's gonna feel too chaotic, too much fun, too out
of control. There is such a thing, so you've got
to find someone who balances you. And I don't think
that's gonna be news to anyone, but it's interesting to
see what what they can come up with based on

(19:25):
birth order love. Maybe we should start our own dating site,
Molly that combines birth order matching, maybe tossing some astrology.
Can we call it first He's rule? Yes that she
would like it to be called firstborn children rule? So
what do you guys think has birth order affected your personality?
Are you a Marcia, Jan or Cindy or Bobby or

(19:47):
Greg or Peter? I can't about the guys, Molly, of
course not. I didn't mean to imply the only girls
should write us, but just how how has uh your
family dynamic been changed by birth order, And I mean,
what so what do we say though for the to
answer our question? Is birth order affect your personality? I
think the studies conclude maybe, but we don't know. So

(20:10):
another another one that science still gets to figure out.
But let us know what you think by writing to
us at mom stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And before we go, let's shall we read one person's
email who wrote us at stuff works dot com. Capital
I dml I. Well, I've got an email here from Krista,

(20:31):
and she wrote us about women in sports, and she
told us a little story about some girls in her
middle school who actually tried out for the football team
and made it on. She said they were the first
girls to ever make it onto the football team, and
not only that, but to the boys football team. I
can't tell you whatever happened with it, because, like I said,
I totally wasn't with it in middle school. But I

(20:52):
remember having a mad girl crush on them just because
they were so courageous for fighting for their rights to
be on the boys football team. Goodness knows. I can't
remember their names anymore, but I can picture the headline
and their picture in the uniforms holding on their football
helmets in my head like it was right in front
of me. So thanks for sending in the story, Christoff,
and as always, if you have any stories to share

(21:12):
with us, please send us an email Mom stuff at
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(21:37):
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