Jeffrey Kluger has an interesting piece on birth order in Time. The article presents a combination of research, anecdote and widely held assumptions on birth order — oldest is smartest, youngest is funniest, middle child is a mystery, etc. I found, as a I read, being from a family of four and being the father of three, that I disagreed — based on personal experience – often with the conclusions drawn in the article, from idea (maybe valid in societies governed by scarcity, but unlikely in middle class America) that the first born has a caloric head start because when he was born there was X amount of food to be shared and as his siblings were born there was less and less food for each as that same amount was divided up into smaller and smaller portions. Or that there is less emotional nurturing for kids who aren't first born. With our kids, I think that the experience is that there is more, because they have each other as nurturers as well as us. An example cited is that the oldest is smarter because he not only gets early educational advantages, but because he is involved with the early education of younger siblings as a teacher. Except that seems to discount the fact that the younger siblings are exposed to more words, more vocabulary and higher level intellectual material earlier than their elder siblings, and can be more challenged and encouraged to push intellectual envelopes than the eldest. While I don't discount that birth order can have some effect on personality, just like any other environmental situation, I think some of the folks making their cases in the article vastly overstate the significance. I'm in agreement with Toni Falbo, who is quoted in the piece as a skeptic on this:
Stack up enough anecdotal maybes, and they start to look like a scientific definitely. Things that appear definite, however, have a funny way of surprising you, and birth order may conceal all manner of hidden dimensions—within individuals, within families, within the scientific studies. "People read birth-order books the way they read horoscopes," warns Toni Falbo, professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas. "'I'm a middle-born, so that explains everything in my life'—it's just not like that."
