Are you the bossy eldest? The troubled middle child? The baby of the family? Or an only child? Does your personality fit with your birth order stereotype? What about your kids? Listen as Dr. Andrea and her brother, musician and sound producer Brian Campbell, talk about birth order effects, how the stereotypes fit with their family, and why the research is so inconsistent.

SHOWNOTES

Contents

• Key Learnings

• References & Links

• Dr. Andrea’s Commentary

• Interview Transcript

• Conclusion

Key Learnings

1. BIRTH ORDER EFFECTS – Some of the stereotypes may be true.

• First born and smaller families scored higher on communication skills, even after controlling for everything else (mothers age, socioeconomic factors, etc.)

• The eldest may be bossier, most ambitious, and most stressed.

• Middle children can face a challenge of creating a unique identity. However they often end up well-adjusted, good negotiators, and social.

• The youngest, the babies of the family, can be entertainers and can benefit from early exposure and learning from their older siblings.

• Only children benefit from the attention of their parents. They tend to be more advanced with stronger vocabularies, a more sophisticated sense of humor, and a better grasp of current events.

2. Birth order effects can vary between different countries or cultures where the experiences of the first born could be highly beneficial in the first world (like having parents who read to them from a young age), but detrimental in the third world (where the oldest child might be expected to quit school, get a job and help provide for the family).

3. The research on birth order effects is inconsistent and shows that they are exaggerated, for two reasons.

a. When the Q of personality traits are asked within the family, they may appear. But when it comes to outside the family, say if you’re asked about a colleague, the influence of or correlation with birth order effects seems to go away.

b. Siblings that are in these relationships, are often evaluated at different ages, relative to each other. The research would be more valid if parents videotaped their children at the same age, and then compared the personality traits. So if my parents had taken a video of each of us when we were ten years old and talked about our personalities, the sibling order effects may not have shown up. Whereas if they were asked to compare us at one point in time, the sibling order effects probably would be evident.

References & Links

Brian Campbell

• Email – [email protected]

• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-r-campbell-2018b9b6/?originalSubdomain=ca

• Photos – https://talkabouttalk.com/about/

Siblings

• National Siblings Day – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siblings_Day

• Qs to ask your siblings – https://www.rootreport.com/sibling-tag-questions/

Sibling Order Effects

Communication Skills

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01755.x

• https://www.jstor.org/stable/1128089?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

General

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00193

• https://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14224.short