Think Firstborns Are More Responsible? Science Says It’s Complicated

We’ve all heard the stereotypes: Firstborn children are responsible, secondborns are independent, and the third is carefree.

Birth-order stereotypes are a neat and tidy way to account for personality differences. They help us understand where and how we fit into our families, and we often think it influences our personalities. But does birth order really matter? And how much of these generalizations are accurate?

According to experts, birth order doesn’t hold much, if any, weight. “There's no compelling or convincing data that birth order in and of itself has any real impact,” says Amy Todey, PhD, a psychologist with a private practice in Atlanta.

“The labels assigned to oldest, youngest, and middle children or to only children rarely hold when one looks at children individually,” agrees Dr. Susan Newman, social psychologist and author of Just One: The New Science, Secrets & Joy of Parenting an Only Child.

So, where did these assumptions come from, and what really contributes to our personalities?

Original birth order theory was created by psychotherapist Alfred Adler, an associate of Sigmund Freud, in the early 1900s as a way to help people understand how they belong. Additionally, Murray Bowen developed Bowenian Family Systems Therapy in the mid-1900s, which places value on understanding how patterns in families repeat across generations.

“Sibling position—i.e., birth order—is one of the ways psychologists understand the roles people take in their family system and how these roles, and the emotional baggage that comes with them, impact the way people engage in new relationships in their lives,” Dr. Todey explains.

More recent studies have had a tough time proving that original thinking, and many experts agree that there are so many more factors that contribute to our personality traits.

In reality, there are so many variables that impact our personalities and how we fit into our families and into society. “Current research strongly suggests [that] the effects of birth order on child development have more to do with parents’ education, finances, parenting styles, [and] how children interact than with any given child’s ordinal position in the family hierarchy,” Dr. Newman says.

Dr. Andrew Kami, a clinical psychologist and professor at Pacific Oaks College, likes to focus on the five aspects below when it comes to understanding what shapes our personalities:

• Family We spend our early years with family and learn by mirroring our parents. “The family acts as a microcosm of the larger society that we're in,” Dr. Kami says.
• Culture instills generational traditions that strongly influence how children grow up. “What are the rules, what are the rituals, what are the ways in which we do things?” he asks.
• Society is the larger world, which is shaped by whom you expose yourself to and how you define acceptable behavior based on the people you surround yourself with.
• Religion can be one of the factors that helps us understand moral wrongs in the world and clarifies what is ok and which actions deserve consequences.
• Biology is our genetic makeup, which influences how we might gravitate towards different choices and be moved in certain directions.

And when we exhibit certain behaviors and receive positive feedback, those behaviors can become ingrained in us. “[Take] a firstborn child who can be a little bit more domineering and leadership oriented,” Dr. Kami says. “When he flexes those [behaviors], if people respond to them, then he will, in turn, continue to use those types of behaviors because that's what [people] respond to, [so] that's what they're used to.”

In addition to the influences listed above, numerous contextual factors can affect personality. For example, a family’s socioeconomic status, a sibling with a disability, divorced parents, or a death in the family can all impact how a child grows and develops.

“Who's getting a parent's attention?” Dr. Todey asks. “Who's expected to be the easy child based on what's going on in the family? Who is emotionally attuned to household stress, or, in the case of divorce, to their parents' emotions and… tries to be the regulator and the peacemaker? Which child learns to wait or to disappear based on what's going on in the dynamic of a family, and cognitive abilities, and the age at which whatever trauma occurs?”

A parent’s ability to provide attention to each child along with their own education, and finances, etc., is much more influential in a child’s development and outcome than a child’s position in the family hierarchy, Dr. Newman explains. “I think the difficulty is that when it's a first child, the parents are new at being parents and maybe have more resources and more time to focus,” she says. “That possibly influences them, which I think is where a lot of the stereotypes come from.”

Memes and social media messages around these stereotypes—think of anything you may have read about take-charge eldest daughters or “chaotic” second children—can also reinforce expectations about birth order. “Memes are a rapid-fire way to spread and reinforce often negative or false information,” Dr. Newman says.

Additionally, people grow and can change over time, which can quickly debunk some of the original traits people may have assumed were based on their place in the family. “Something could happen, and then all of a sudden your youngest child, who had no responsibilities, takes charge,” Dr. Newman says. Placing assumptions about someone because of their birth order isn’t a good way to understand them or what they are capable of.

There are many factors that shape our personalities, from the time our parents devote to each child to socioeconomic status to whether our parents are married or divorced to which traits our families reinforce and which they correct. The child's age when each of these factors changes can also make a difference.

“The age of the children, spacing between siblings, and individual incidents or factors are going to change the so-called labels we've been stuck with for decades,” Dr. Newman says.

Ultimately, each child is different, and recognizing those differences, regardless of how many siblings precede or follow them, is the key. “I think you have to look at each child individually and include all the factors just mentioned,” she says, “which are much more powerful than who was born first, middle, or second or last.”