Does Birth Order Effect Your Life - Part 1 - Introduction

By Marcia Kaye

Some researchers say birth order can influence your personality. Here's how your place in the family can affect your life.

Let's say you're planning a party. If you have every detail perfectly worked out a week ahead of time, right down to the color-coordinated cocktail napkins, you're probably the eldest child in your family. If you casually throw things together and invite a few extra guests at the last minute, it would be a safe bet that you're a middle child. If you'd rather someone else did the work and you just showed up and entertained everyone, you're likely the baby.

Birth order, and its influence on how you live your life, has been a topic of fascination for more than a century among researchers, psychologists, therapists and anyone who is intrigued by family dynamics.

"People use birth order as a way of making powerful sense out of their lives," says Frank Sulloway, visiting scholar and member of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley. (Now, for all you first-born skeptics who are thinking that California spawns a host of wacko theories, please note that Sulloway is one of the world's foremost birth order researchers, with a PhD from Harvard in the history of science.)

He says siblings share only about half the same genes, which leaves a combination of non-identical genes and environmental influences to account for their personality differences. "And birth order is still among the largest differences we are able to document," he says. In fact, birth order differences play nearly as strong a role as gender differences.

We assume siblings are born into the exact same family, but in truth they're not. First-borns come into an environment of adults, typically receiving lots of attention from inexperienced parents who are enthralled by every milestone and terrified by every mishap.

By contrast, middle-borns never experience having parents to themselves, and are overshadowed by their older and more competent siblings-who are running, climbing and talking before them-while expected to set an example for the younger ones.

Then the baby of the family arrives in a busy kid-centered household with seasoned, often more relaxed parents. They aren't focused on every milestone by this point, and so this child soon learns to trade charm for attention.

As a result, first-borns are conditioned to achieve, middles to accommodate, babies to delight.

While Ottawa therapist and educator Marion Balla cautions that birth order doesn't directly cause certain personality traits, she does say, "I believe birth order is one of the strong factors in personality development." Balla is president of the Adlerian Counselling and Consulting Group, named for Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychotherapist who was the first, back in the early 1900s, to link birth order to personality development. Balla says, "For 40 years I've been using birth order as a way to help people understand the way they view themselves and how it can influence their relationships."