"Are you older and wiser than your brother or sister - or younger and more rebellious? There has long been a fascination with how our position amongst siblings affects character traits, but new research has revealed that these stereotypes do not stand up to scrutiny. However, there may be other reasons to be envious of your sibling's birth position."
Read the item at www.bbc.com/news/health-34700739
3 comments:
One of the more extraordinary books on birth order is Frank J Sulloway's Born to Rebel (1997). It's written by a statistician, so bits of it are dense, to say the least, but his theories on how birth order has affected history are worth the effort of wading through the numbers and charts. I say this as a smarter and healthier elder sister, of course.
Re the article "Older Siblings" ... when I stopped either nodding in agreement (not much of this went on) and/or stopped laughing (thinking about the family of 8 boys that grew up down the road from us back in Canada) I just have to comment on why they do these studies in the first place. Could there not be a better way of spending money given to scientists/psychologists or universities than this?
Signed second born and as normal as the next ...
This goes round and round, since the early sixties with Walter Tolman's book on Birth order. Occasionally it gets discounted, then revived. In my family of four siblings, most of the stuff that is written is just tosh. Nurture,and events overtake pure birth order. Tony Boegarts work is interesting, but having worked with numerous LBGTQ groups as a volunteer, I think there are still some questions. Nevertheless of current interest.
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