One Friday afternoon at a party, I’m sitting in a garden next to a young mother of two. Her baby is only a couple of weeks old and is lying on her chest, out for the count. They’d taken a long time, she tells me, to come up with a name for their second child. After all, they’d already used their favorite name: it had gone to their first.
On the scale of a human life, it’s small-fry, but as a metaphor I find it significant. I think of the proverbs we have around second times—second choice, second place, second fiddle, eternal second. I think of Buzz Aldrin, always in the shadow of the one who went before him, out there on the moon. I think of my sister and my son: both second children.
Thanks to the findings of sibling scientists, I now know that firstborns and second-borns are shaped by each other, each in their own way. But I continue to wonder whether one of them doesn’t end up drawing the short straw.
I was the first child in our family, the eldest, numero uno. I was also fearful of failure, neurotic, a perfectionist, ambitious—undoubtedly to the point of being unbearable. My sister didn’t study as hard and went out more, worked at every trendy bar in town and spent many an after-school afternoon horizontal, on the sofa, in front of the TV.
I’ve long attributed the differences in our characters to the different positions we held in our family. It seemed to me, all things considered, better to be the first: you had to work harder to expand the boundaries your parents set for you, blazed a trail for your generation yourself, had a greater sense of responsibility, more persistence, and emerged, in the end, more self-confident.
That theory worked in my favor, but during my pregnancy I started to feel sorry for my son. Through no fault of his own, he’d missed out on the enviable position of firstborn. It took that sense of pity for me to realize that I could try to uncover the basis of my ideas about the personality traits of first and second children—and whether there was anything to them.
What I hadn’t expected was that the trail of my assumptions would lead to one of the most controversial subjects in the social sciences.
It was 1874, and Francis Galton, an intellectual all-rounder and a half cousin of Charles Darwin, published English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. These were the early days of psychology: the belief in objective science, in measuring things as the key to knowledge, was enjoying its heyday. Like many other thinkers of that period, Galton was interested in the factors that determined a person’s success in life. In his book, he profiled one hundred and eighty prominent scientists, and in the course of his research Galton noticed something peculiar: among his subjects, firstborns were overrepresented.1
Galton’s observation was the first in a long line of scientific and pseudoscientific publications on the subject: on the effect of your place in the family on the course of your life—on the birth-order effect. The greater chance of success for firstborns, in Galton’s view, was because of their upbringing, an explanation that fitted in with the mores of the Victorian era: eldest sons had a greater chance of having their education paid for by their parents, parents gave their eldest sons more attention as well as responsibility, and in families of limited financial resources, parents might care just a little bit better for their firstborns. The distribution system at the foundation of this is called primogeniture: the right of the eldest son (or considerably less frequently, the eldest daughter) as heir.2
Primogeniture was widespread for a long time in Europe, I learn when I read up on the history of family relationships.
Among Portuguese nobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, second- and later-born sons were sent to the front as soldiers more often than firstborn sons. Second and subsequent daughters were more likely than eldest daughters to end up in the convent.3
In Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was generally the eldest brother who was permitted to marry, after which younger brothers would live with him and his family, dependent and subservient.4
Primogeniture is also one of the reasons why, in fairy tales, conflict between brothers is often the most fierce.5 After all, as a British historian once put it, “The manner of splitting property is the manner of splitting people.”6
Apart from a few royal families, primogeniture is no longer the norm in Western countries. At most it plays a role in family businesses. Somewhere in the course of the last century, most residents of industrialized countries became convinced that all our children had a right to precisely the same—that love, attention, time, and inheritance should be divided equally and fairly.
That’s what my partner and I strive to achieve: equal treatment of our two children, no hierarchy at home. But then we can’t get around the fact that first, second, and subsequent children all have slightly different starting points. The question is precisely what consequences that has, and how insurmountable they are.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Alfred Adler, Freud’s erstwhile follower, the one who believed that the arrival of a younger sibling meant the dethronement of the firstborn, introduced the birth-order effect into the domain of personality psychology. According to Adler, the eldest identifies most with the adults in his environment and therefore develops both a greater sense of responsibility and more neuroses. The youngest has the greatest chance of being spoiled and is also, often, more creative. All children in the middle—Adler himself was a middle child—are emotionally more stable and independent: they’re the peacemakers, the diplomats, used to sharing from the start, and therefore less demanding.7
After Galton and Adler, the idea that family position affects personality has been subjected to many a scientific test. These tests generated a series of factoids that undoubtedly still fly across the table at Christmas dinners: that firstborn children are overrepresented as Nobel Prize winners,8 composers of classical music,9 and, funnily enough, among “prominent psychologists.”10 Subsequent children, on the other hand, were more likely to have supported the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.11
A friend, the eldest out of her nest of four, presses into my hands a book that her mother claims to have been all the rage among parents she knew during the 1990s. The title is Brothers and Sisters: The Order of Birth in the Family, and it was written in the mid-twentieth century by the Viennese pediatrician and anthroposophist Karl König.
What strikes me from the very first pages is the certainty with which König characterizes first, second, and third children—as if the birth-order effect were a law of nature, whereby A inevitably leads to B. For example, he quotes a study conducted in the early twentieth century stating that a first child is “more likely to be serious, sensitive,” “conscientious,” and “good” and—this is my favorite—“fond of books.”
Later on, these first children can become “shy, even fearful,” or they become “self-reliant, independent.” A second child, by contrast, is “placid, easy-going, friendly [and] cheerful”—unless they are “stubborn, rebellious, independent (or apparently so)” and “able to take a lot of punishment.”12
These typologies most resemble horoscopes, in the sense that it can’t have been difficult, in the 1950s any more than now, to recognize yourself at least partially in any of them. Amenable or stubborn, anxious or self-assured—you’ve pretty much covered the entire spectrum there.
So I go back online, in search of clarification. By now, studies looking into the birth-order effect number in the thousands, and approaches and methods vary considerably—from case studies of psychiatric patients to qualitative interviews to the analysis of large data sets.
There’s no shortage of popular publications either: in recent decades, titles such as Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives and Birth Order Blues: How Parents Can Help Their Children Meet the Challenges of Birth Order have helped spread the idea that your place in the family determines who you are.
In 2003, two US and two Polish psychologists asked hundreds of participants, from university undergraduates and high school students to a representative sample drawn from the Polish population, what they knew about birth order. The majority of respondents were convinced that those born earlier had a greater chance of a prestigious career than those born later, and that those different career opportunities had to do with their specific birth-order-related character traits.
In sum, a century after the possible existence of the birth-order effect was first proposed, it had become common knowledge.13 That knowledge is now so common, in fact, that it lends itself to satire: “Study Shows Eldest Children Are Intolerable Wankers,” a headline on the Dutch satirical news website De Speld quipped in early 2018.
Nevertheless, there is plenty of criticism of birth-order theories and the associated empirical research. I don’t have to dig for long in the mountain of birth-order studies to come across the caveats.
It’s not at all straightforward, critics point out, to know what you’re measuring when attempting to unravel the factors that shape an individual human life. And it’s very difficult to exclude all the “noise,” as physicists in a laboratory would be able to do more easily. There’s a substantial chance that traits we might attribute to a person’s birth order have more to do with, say, socioeconomic status, the size or ethnicity of the family, or the values of a particular culture.
In order to properly research whether the birth-order effect exists, you’d have to use gigantic data sets. Ideally, you wouldn’t just compare first, second, and third children from different families, but also children from the same family, at the same age. That’s a daunting task, and few studies satisfy that requirement. (Birth-order effect pioneer Francis Galton drew his generalized conclusions, for example, on the basis of fewer than two hundred “English men of science”—a tiny sample, and not exactly a cross-section of British society.)
It’s enough to drive a person crazy, I think: so many assumptions, so much research, so few hard conclusions—although I suppose the latter is often the case, in the social sciences. They tend to provide more nuance rather than painting things in black and white—and rightly so.
But I need to know if there’s a counterargument to be made, in response to the certainty with which a friend remarks that second children are always “much more chill” than first children. Or to the way a family member takes it for granted that our son, independent and sociable as he is, is a “typical second child.”
Is there a counterargument?
Yes, certainly. In the past few years, considerably more reliable research has become available regarding the personality traits of first and second children. The end of 2015 saw the publication of two studies in which the methodological shortcomings of previous birth-order research (unrepresentative sample sets, incorrect inferences) were largely obviated.
In one of these studies, two US psychologists analyzed data about the personality traits and family position of 377,000 secondary school pupils in the United States. They did find associations between birth order and personality, but besides being tiny—“statistically significant but meaningless,” as one of the researchers formulated it—they also partially ran counter to those predicted by the prevailing theories. For instance, firstborn children in this data set might be a little more cautious, but they were also less neurotic than later-born children.14
The other study looked for the relationship between personality and birth order in data from the United States, Britain, and Germany for a total of more than twenty thousand people. The researchers compared both children from different families and siblings from the same family, and corrected for factors such as family size and age.
This study was more extensive and precise than anything that had gone before. Here, too, the results were disillusioning, at least for those who believe that eldest children as a rule are more responsible and youngest children more rebellious. The researchers in fact found no relationship between a person’s place in the family and any personality trait whatsoever, be it extroversion, kindness, emotional stability, diligence, or imagination.15
It’s a relief, I note, to read their conclusions. As if my children have been given a little extra room to maneuver, a larger field, free of set routes. Whoever my son is or will become, his character has not, or in any case not only, been determined by the blindly coincidental fact of his having arrived second. My relief is conditional, of course—science, after all, has a tendency to change its mind. But apparently for me, for now, it’s sufficient.
And now? The results of these two studies suggest that the birth-order effect on personality does not exist, that it’s a fable, the authors write in an accompanying article.
Nevertheless, they cherish little hope of ridding the world of that fable.16 After all, they write, it takes forever for academic insights to trickle down to the general public. And in any case, we tend to be swayed less by scientific results than by our own personal experiences.
Perhaps what’s more important, they write, is that the belief in the existence of the birth-order effect is so stubborn because it’s easily confused with age. Pretty much everyone can see with their own eyes that older children (who were born earlier) behave differently from younger children (who were born later). And there’s a good chance that a first child, when compared with a second child, will appear more cautious and anxious. It’s just that this difference probably has more to do with age than with birth order.
The second child is quicker to anger, I had said to that other mother in the parenting course. But hadn’t my daughter been just as irascible when she was my son’s age?
I’d described him as more emotionally stable. Perhaps what I’d meant is that I can quite easily discern his emotions, which for now are relatively basic. They’re still so close to the surface: his entire face joins in when he’s angry, or happy, or sad. He sulks when something doesn’t go his way, bows his head and looks askance when he’s doing something he knows isn’t really allowed, throws everything within reach on the floor when he’s angry. When he’s excited, he wags, even in the absence of a tail. His sister’s feelings have already grown more subtle and complex, and the way they’re expressed has become hard to read, for her as well as for me.
That difference in age might also be the reason that children from the same family are often assigned specific roles, the psychologist Kirsten Buist tells me when I present her with the two US scientists’ hypothesis. Although research suggests there are no fixed differences in personality, we might impose them to some extent. Parents tell the eldest to be responsible, and the youngest to listen to the eldest. The behavior that follows from this is an expression of that role, not of a person’s character—but good luck making that distinction with the naked eye.
I think of the way we tried to prepare my daughter for the arrival of her little brother. How, to avoid disappointment, we refrained from telling her there would soon be someone she could play with and instead said that there would be someone who couldn’t do anything at all. She’d be able to explain everything to him, we’d said, because she already knew so much, was so very capable.
The prospect had certainly appealed to her.
Little did we know we were talking her into a stereotype-perpetuating role.
In the early 1990s, a group of political scientists observed with barely concealed exasperation that birth order had been “linked to a truly staggering range of behaviors.”17 They for their part tried to debunk the myth that even a person’s political preferences were determined by their position in the family by reviewing studies that addressed, among other things, whether firstborns had “an uncommon tendency to enter into political careers,” were more conservative than those born later, and were more likely to hold political office. Their meta-analysis failed to find consistent patterns—but did find myriad methodological flaws.
The controversy invoked by the subject is fascinating enough, but what fascinates me even more is the longing that seems to fuel the persistence of scientists and laypeople alike. It’s a longing to confirm that our children’s place in the family ranking has marked them for life.
Of course, all the circumstances in which a child comes into the world—whether they’re born male or female, in war or peace, into relative poverty or exorbitant wealth—end up making a person who they are. But the birth-order effect seems to particularly enthuse and preoccupy us.
Perhaps because it’s so concrete: it’s rather more fun and more satisfying to attribute a small baby’s generous smile to the fact that he’s a second child than to a vague interplay of personality and environment, expectations and discernment.
Such concreteness and simplicity are especially attractive, I suppose, if we attribute the effect to ourselves. It absolves us for a moment of the responsibility for who we are and the duty to make ourselves what we want to become: my neuroticism isn’t my fault, it’s just because I’m the eldest.
My son began to dole out little smiles when he was barely four weeks old. They were not just twitches or reflexes, I knew for sure, but outright attempts at contact. He began smiling earlier than his sister had, and this made sense to me: he was the second child, after all, and so the more sociable one, just like my own sister.
It didn’t occur to me in that moment that this interpretation of mine was founded on stories we’d been passing on for generations, packaged in throwaway remarks like “typical second child” or “because I’m the eldest…”
It’s only now that I’m beginning to understand that those stories have a history. And that, without us really realizing it, they might shape our children’s present as well as their future.