The number and spacing of older and younger siblings have a small, but detectable, influence on the child’s attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Helen Koch, a child psychologist who worked at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, studied five- and six-year-olds from intact, mainly middle-class families with two children. The firstborn, compared with later-born, children were more competi-tive, more upset when they lost a contest or received a poor grade, and more concerned with their status among peers.
Most firstborn, middle-class children who have affectionate parents find it easy to accept parental demands for school achievement and to view legitimate authorities—teachers, police, doctors—as desirable models to emulate. This favorable attitude toward authority is an extension of their perception of parents as caring, concerned with their welfare, and usually just when they dispense punishments. It is not surprising, therefore, that first-borns are overrepresented among each year’s valedictorians at America’s high schools and colleges and in the pages of Who’s
Who in America. When two brothers were both major league base-ball players, but neither a pitcher, the older brother usually had a higher batting average than the younger one.
Later-borns, especially if the interval between them and the next older sibling of the same gender is less than four years, envy what they perceive as the special attention and privileges the eldest receives and harbor a private anger toward parents, which later extends to all authority, for actions that they believe are unjust.
Unlike firstborns, who place a halo on authority figures, later-borns regard those in authority as possessing “clay feet.” Hence, they work a little less hard in school, and if they live in neighbor-hoods with temptations for asocial activity they are more likely to commit a crime. John Wideman was a firstborn, but his younger brother is serving life in a Pennsylvania prison for killing a man during an armed robbery. Firstborns more often choose the voca-tions favored by authority, such as law, medicine, and business.
Later-borns are attracted to careers as writers and artists, who typi-cally challenge the status quo.
I was teaching an undergraduate class the day that the Warren Commission issued its judgment that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when, in 1963, he shot John F. Kennedy; thus the rumors of a conspiracy were unfounded. I asked each student to scour the campus the next day and interview any undergraduate who knew about the Warren report, ask them if they thought that judgment was correct or a cover-up, and, finally, inquire about their ordinal position. More firstborn Harvard students, who trust authority, agreed with the decision. More later-borns, who are suspicious of authority, disagreed. I am true to my position as a firstborn, for I believed the Warren Commission report.
The temperamental traits of Marjorie and Lisa were supported
by their sibling positions. Marjorie, who worries about violating her family’s values, is a firstborn; Lisa, who often challenges authority, is a later-born.
The firstborn typically receives a great deal of affection from the mother because this is her first child. As a result, the eldest more often establishes a coalition with the mother and the second-born forms a coalition with the father. In families with three or more children, the middle-born youth often have the most difficult time because the eldest and the youngest receive special parental attention for different reasons. Thus, it may not be surprising that adolescents with both an older and a younger sibling are more likely to engage in self-injurious behavior, such as cutting the wrists, than the first- or last-born in the family.
Frank Sulloway, a historian and psychologist at the University of California, discovered that later-born scientists were more likely than firstborns to invent and to support theories that were serious challenges to the opinions of older, respected scientists and incon-sistent with the beliefs held by a majority in the society. Copernicus and Darwin were later-borns who challenged the biblical account of the earth’s position in the cosmos or the origin of humans, and a majority of the scholars who supported their ideas before they became widely accepted were also later-borns. Later-borns were almost twice as likely as firstborns, across twenty-eight revolutionary scientific ideas, to support the radical theory, and this readiness to adopt the position of rebel was stronger if the later-born came from a less-privileged family. A majority of the scholars who first supported Freud and formed the International Psychoanalytic Society early in the twentieth century were later-borns. The passionate promotion of a bold idea that challenges the beliefs of those in positions of legitimate authority is more likely if
the rebels believe they have a right to question the status quo. This state of mind can be created in different ways. It can be the result of worldly success, a life of sacrifice for others, being loved by someone who is admired, or the belief that one has been a victim of injustice and unfair treatment. I suspect that this last mecha-nism is the most common among the later-borns who promote original but unpopular ideas.
Of course, many scientists who made original discoveries were firstborns—Einstein is one example. However, more physi-cists who accepted relativity theory when it was still controversial were later-born. Equally important, the public’s values were not seriously threatened by the concepts of relativity theory, in part because it did not understand them. Nineteenth-century European society was threatened by Darwin’s ideas.
Radical writing styles that break with traditional form or content often emerge in societies that are geographically close to a more successful or dominating society, a feature that is analogous to being a later-born. Ireland, which was invaded and dominated by England for more than one thousand years, was the childhood home of George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Samuel Beckett. All four challenged the preferred writing style of their generation and the dominant values of their society.
My younger brother, four years my junior and growing up in my shadow, resented the fact that his teachers were continually comparing my good grade record with his. In an attempt to find his distinctive identity, he chose law rather than science. He became very religious in his fourth decade and reminds me regularly of my error in remaining an atheist. I suspect that his late religious commitment served several functions, one of which was to allow him to feel morally superior to his wayward older brother.