| Ed, how are you getting on with the reading for our presentation next week? |
| Well, OK, Ruth - but there's so much of it. |
| I know, |
| I hadn't realised birth order was such a popular area of research. |
| But the stuff on birth order and personality is mostly unreliable. |
| From what I've been reading, |
| a lot of the claims about how your position in the family determines certain personality traits are just stereotypes, |
| with no robust evidence to support them. |
| OK, but that's an interesting point - |
| we could start by outlining what previous research has shown. |
| There are studies going back over a hundred years. |
| Yeah - so we could just run through some of the typical traits. |
| Like the consensus seems to be that oldest children are generally less well-adjusted |
| because they never get over the arrival of a younger sibling. |
| Right, but on a positive note, |
| some studies claimed that they were thought to be good at nurturing - |
| certainly in the past when people had large families, |
| they would have been expected to look after the younger ones. |
| There isn't such a clear picture for middle children - |
| but one trait that a lot of the studies mention |
| is that they are easier to get on with than older or younger siblings. |
| Mm. Generally eager to please and helpful - |
| although that's certainly not accurate as far as my family goes - |
| my middle brother was a nightmare - |
| always causing fights and envious of whatever I had. |
| As I said - none of this seems to relate to my own experience. |
| I'm the youngest in my family |
| and I don't recognise myself in any of the studies I've read about. |
| I'm supposed to have been a sociable and confident child who made friends easily |
| but I was actually terribly shy. |
| Really? That's funny. |
| There have been hundreds of studies on twins but mostly about nurture versus nature... |
| There was one on personality, which said that a twin is likely to be quite shy in social situations |
| because they always have their twin around to depend on for support. |
| My cousins were like that when they were small - |
| they were only interested in each other and found it hard to engage with other kids. |
| They're fine now though. |
| Only children have had a really bad press - |
| a lot of studies have branded them as loners who think the world revolves around them |
| because they've never had to fight for their parents' attention. |
| That does seem a bit harsh. |
| One category I hadn't considered before was children with much older siblings - |
| a couple of studies mentioned that these children grow up more quickly |
| and are expected to do basic things for themselves - like getting dressed. |
| I can see how that might be true - |
| although I expect they're sometimes the exact opposite - |
| playing the baby role and clamouring for special treatment. |
| What was the problem with most of these studies, do you think? |
| I think it was because |
| in a lot of cases data was collected from only one sibling per family, |
| who rated him or herself and his or her siblings at the same time. |
| Some of the old research into the relationship between birth order and academic achievement has been proved to be accurate though. |
| Performances in intelligence tests decline slightly from the eldest child to his or her younger siblings. |
| This has been proved in lots of recent studies. |
| Yes. Although what many of them didn't take into consideration was family size. |
| The more siblings there are, the likelier the family is to have a low socioeconomic status - |
| which can also account for differences between siblings in academic performance. |
| The oldest boy might be given more opportunities than his younger sisters, for example. |
| Exactly. |
| But the main reason for the marginally higher academic performance of oldest children is quite surprising, I think. |
| It's not only that they benefit intellectually from extra attention at a young age - |
| which is what I would have expected. |
| It's that they benefit from being teachers for their younger siblings, by verbalising processes. |
| Right, and this gives them status and confidence, |
| which again contributes, in a small way, to better performance. |
| So would you say sibling rivalry has been a useful thing for you? |
| I think so, my younger brother was incredibly annoying. |
| And we fought a lot |
| but I think this has made me a stronger person. |
| I know how to defend myself. |
| We had some terrible arguments and I would have died rather than apologise to him. |
| But we had to put up with each other and most of the time we coexisted amicably enough. |
| Yes, my situation was pretty similar. |
| But I don't think having two older brothers made me any less selfish. |
| I was never prepared to let my brothers use any of my stuff... |
| That's perfectly normal... |