<p>In my family I was the high-achieving older student and my sister was the party girl. I went to an “elite” college; she went to a mediocre flagship out of state and then a directional in our home state. Today, she is much more successful than I am (although admittedly she may have had an easier time since she doesn’t have children).</p>
<p>With my kids the older one is the more intellectually gifted, but he is very “right brain” like his parents and hops from one shiny object to the next (and there’s ALWAYS another shiny object!). He is starting to focus now that he is in college, but he is nothing like his younger sister, who has a much better work ethic and achieves whatever goals she sets for herself. Her discipline in and out of school is pretty remarkable for someone her age. Having said that, she doesn’t love learning for the sake of learning like her brother does, but rather sees school as a means to an end.</p>
<p>My oldest three are definitely overachievers and my youngest is not. His IQ is the highest but he is not motivated by grades as the others were. He is only interested in working hard at the things that interest him. He is enormously creative and I am doing my best to not be a “one size fits all” parent. It is challenging for me because there was enormous comfort in the older three doing all they needed to do to jump through the next hoop. This last one will be different. And I will not put enormous pressure on him to behave like his older siblings. He is the kindest, most loving, sweetest of the four and part of that is because of his lack of interest in being competitive. </p>
<p>I am trying to “love the kid on the couch” and trying to break out of the rigid tiger mother definitions of what is valuable in children. It is not laziness on my part or lack of engagement. I hope it is because I have evolved as a parent and am less afraid.</p>
<p>Well I was off to Google ‘mommy woo legend’ and got no hits! What the heck is that?</p>
<p>I am the youngest of 6 kids (all girls) 13 years difference between me & oldest. Oldest has a PhD (only one in family) in math, though she is a part-time professor and also works in a religious service organization. It is generally agreed that she and I performed the best in school (I have been an at-home mom with an engineering degree for 23 years). By far the best achiever in business world is the third child, who is a bank VP. She was always considered an ‘overachiever’ in school because she daydreamed though the standardized test instructions in elementary school. Others are music teacher, French teacher, and real estate agent with a law degree. Most of us are happy with our choices and don’t care that we are not the highest achievers. Sure the rules were much more relaxed by the time I was an adolescent, but I did very well in school. There are many more things that affect achievement than birth order.</p>
<p>My extended family had some families which fit that pattern and others which went completely against it. However, it did seem the high achievers in my family were more likely to be concentrated among the middle and youngest. </p>
<p>Same with observations of other families…including a few with twins.</p>
<p>“There are many more things that affect achievement than birth order.”</p>
<p>I don’t know…I think my middle kid got the short end of the stick when he was younger and it doesn’t help he’s also is the one with ADD. The oldest got more attention because he’s 4 years older and the youngest did because he’s less than 2 years younger than the middle one.</p>
<p>The oldest is doing well in college and the youngest while still in middle school is also a high achiever. However my middle son has a tough road to haul and I wonder if things would have been better for him if he wasn’t the middle child.</p>
<p>My understanding is that birth order is linked to achievement–but I suspect that the reasons for it may be more complex.</p>
<p>Just yesterday I was watching a lecture from the “Justice” course at Harvard (really excellent, available on iTunes University), and the professor was talking about innate advantages, and this birth order point was mentioned. He asked the class–which is a huge class, in Sanders Theater–how many of them were the first born in their families. About three-quarters of them raised their hands.</p>
<p>Ditto. In our family, I–the youngest of two–was definitely higher-achieving academically, and if you go by SAT scores, more intelligent by a significant margin.</p>
<p>My sib has 4 kids. The most intelligent are probably the second and the fourth. The fourth is the academic standout of the family. The third is an outstanding achiever in the arts. The first makes the most money.</p>
<p>My second was a pound smaller than her older brother. She was also a better achiever in school. </p>
<p>In the family I grew up in, the firstborn was the better achiever in school (and both kids were the same size at birth). But in my husband’s family, the secondborn was the better achiever.</p>
<p>Are there any statisticians in the house? Our anecdotal evidence is not enough to say anything about this. If, say, being first born made it 10% more likely that a kid will be a high achiever, we wouldn’t notice this at all.</p>
<p>I thought that Trump was a middle kid, I guess I was wrong.
This is pretty much waste of somebody money and time…like many other projects around us. I am sure the “oldest” siblings being more successful just figured out how to milk money out of nothing since nobody would care about it, there is no practical imlications of this at all, empty…I just realized that I am a genius, yes, I am a first born, wow, then everybody has to listen to me, have to tell my H. first…but I am in trouble already, he is also the first born and the “only”, then he must be even more genius, wow, I have to listen to him, not good…</p>
<p>…another dounting thought, my younger bro is a PhD, and I am only an MBA. I am a very rare exception of the non-genius, rather inferior first born. So, this is a purpose of this study, to have a negative effiect on people, well, the goal is achieved at least in my case…</p>
<p>I think there is something to birth order studies - mostly because each succeeding kid seems to instinctually try to differentiate themselves from their siblings. That said, my oldest seemed to win the gene pool intellectually. (He had some minor neurological issues.) I didn’t teach him to read at two, or figure out fractions at four that was his insatiable curiosity. Younger son was much more interested in people and paid attention to how people acted, he didn’t learn to read till he was seven. (Both ended up with virtually identical verbal SAT scores though.)</p>
<p>I definitely would put hard working ethic well above intelligence based on observations, not statistics. Smarts are enough if you are very lucky. “Regular” a.k.a “most” achievers are the ones who have worked very very hard. It is recognized which is great. Cannot get accepted to selective places based stritcly on your scores, got to show high GPA. And most of the time high scores could also be achieved thru hard preparation. I just do not see how you can get straight As without hard work. Not possible!!!</p>
<p>This is a really interesting topic! I’ve always liked studies like this (though I do agree that there’s much subjectivity that affects validity). </p>
<p>There’s a big age gap between my younger siblings and I, and I wonder how that affects things? </p>
<p>My two sisters are 7 and 4 whereas I’m almost 18 (though in college). My mom had me in her early-mid twenties and didn’t have my 7 year-old sister until after she became a professor, and she had my youngest sister right before she became chair.</p>
<p>When I was smaller, my mom would help me with my homework and make sure that I was doing well, but she also had her own homework and her own studying to do. I think that kind of set up a good model for me, and I know that it’s something not every child gets to experience. </p>
<p>When my sisters came around, my mom was done with her own education and primarily kept work at work. She was more into doing family activities, and she’s very into having “girl time” with her two daughters. </p>
<p>So for me, I’ve known education to always be around in my mother’s life as both a student and professor, and when I reached high school and had to start buckling down, I knew what I had to do. </p>
<p>For my sisters, they’re not really old enough to analyze their intelligence, but all they’ve ever known is “Professor Mommy,” so I’m curious how that will differentiate them from me, who knew both “Professor Mommy” and “MA/PhD Mommy.”</p>
<p>I think you took more negative meaning in what I said than I intended. I don’t think my sister is a slacker, I think she is immature-- and she is. She is very smart and much more capable than I am by far, but she doesn’t know that and doesn’t do anything to help herself get the things she wants-- she never learned to help herself. Somehow she entered the adult world believing that she isn’t capable and needs to be coddled, and she acts like she is happy to keep living like she is still 14 years old into her 20’s even though she isn’t. I think someday she will grow into herself and achieve more than me, but in the meantime she is struggling with herself a lot. I’m not saying it to be mean, I’m saying it because I am sorry that she is struggling so much. I am not sure if it is parenting differences or something else that made us so different, but I don’t think being the baby of the family did her any favors. She is old enough now to get herself into real trouble and doesn’t seem to have the skills to get herself off that track, or if she does she doesn’t know she has them. It’s frustrating to watch.</p>
<p>Our “birth order” stuff is all kind of skewed because my mom had her first child in her first marriage when she was a teenager, and my older sister is severely mentally ill and was completely out of our lives by the time I was 7 until quite recently. Raising her was just different, and I was my dad’s first. My younger sister has almost no memory of living with my older sister. I am the middle child, but not, the oldest, but not. Families are complicated.</p>
<p>In most of the families that I can think of with multiple children, the oldest is the highest acheiver (in terms of stereotypical academic/career success), though I can think of a few exceptions. One thing that stands in almost all cases (all that I can think of except mine), is that the higher acheiver, whether younger or older, also feels a substantial amount of pressure and anxiety about acheiving that I just don’t see in the other siblings, most often the younger ones. If the premise of this study is true, and older children tend to be more successful because they are parented differently, I don’t know that I’d say they are parented BETTER. I think it is better to have a child with middling acheivement who is mentally well adjusted than the academic rockstar who has a nervous breakdown over a B or a missed opportunity for a perfect attendance award.</p>
<p>S1 sounds alot like mathmom’s oldest…he picked up on things, was curious, wanted to learn (preferred academics to arts & crafts even as a preschooler). He had confidence in his academic abilities, skipped a grade, always did well at school.</p>
<p>S2 had less confidence and tended to compare himself to his older brother, no matter how much we told him not to. He’s more attentive to other people’s feelings. He did well in school, just not as well as S1. I don’t think he had less intellectual ability, just that he had less confidence in his abilities and would be harder on himself when he didn’t live up to his self-imposed standards.</p>
<p>When it came to the SATs, they both did very well, but S2 actually scored higher.</p>