Birth Order & You. Dr. Ronald W. Richardson & Lois A. Richardson

       Give me a child for the first seven years and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

      Jesuit saying

      Aaron is 55 years old. He is a senior partner in a large, successful law firm in Pittsburgh, where he has worked since graduating from law school. He and his wife, Beatrice, his high school sweetheart, have two children now in university. Aaron is on the board of several non-profit agencies in Pittsburgh and is an elder in his church. He works most weekday evenings, but usually manages to play golf with important clients on Saturday. He gets up early every morning to swim.

      Aaron and Beatrice have a cordial, but rather distant, relationship. Aaron is definitely the master of the house and was the disciplinarian when the children were young, punishing them more often and more severely than Beatrice would have wished. He loves his wife and children, but isn’t able to express it very often in ways they can understand. He has high standards for them all and doesn’t hesitate to let them know when they have failed to meet those standards. When Beatrice doesn’t seem to have the household organized sufficiently well, Aaron feels let down. If the children get less than an A- in any course, he thinks they must be goofing off because he knows they are capable of doing much better.

      He also drives himself hard at the office and expects his staff to do the same “for the sake of the firm.” When his secretary of 10 years resigned recently, he felt personally betrayed and refused to attend her going-away luncheon. He prides himself on his own loyalty and has kept in touch with previous partners who retired after he started with the firm.

      He dutifully visits his mother in a nursing home every week and pays her expenses. He had invited her to move into his home, but she didn’t want to bother his family.

      Brad is 53 years old, unmarried, and works as a shoe salesman. He owns a $30,000 sports car, but not his own home. He has more debts than he can handle, partly because of the amount he spends on cigarettes and drink. He is a chain-smoker and an unacknowledged alcoholic. He spends most evenings at the neighborhood pub. He gets along with almost anybody, and people genuinely like him when he’s sober, but he often turns mean when he’s been drinking. He has only a few friends who still tolerate him consistently.

      He was involved for several years with a married woman at one of the shoe stores where he worked. When her husband found out about it, he was forced to quit his job there. He was on employment insurance for six months before he found another selling job.

      Evelyn is 49 years old and looks 35. She is a vivacious, pretty, almost-natural blonde. She lives in Denver with her husband Lee. She moved away from her hometown when she was 18 to get away from her strict, domineering parents and has been back to visit only two or three times since.

      When she works, Evelyn works as a receptionist; she prefers to stay home so she can ski in the winter and go to the beach in the summer.

      She has been married and divorced twice and has recently married again. Her first two husbands just couldn’t keep her happy and seemed too much like parents to her. She enjoyed the comfortable life she had with them, though, and didn’t like having to work when she was between marriages.

      As a young wife, she kept house half-heartedly and spent most of her free time visiting friends and going to parties. Her son by her first marriage spent half of his time with his father, though he worshipped his mother and as an adult enjoyed being her escort before she remarried. Although she often left him with babysitters when he was a child, Evelyn enjoys her son very much as an adult and has never been critical of anything he has done.

      What do Aaron, Brad, and Evelyn have in common? Very little it seems. And yet they have the same parents and grew up in the same family just a few years apart. They are siblings — two brothers and a sister (in that order).

      Your birth order position (whether born first, second, last, etc.), your sex (male or female), and the sex of your siblings affect the kind of person you become. The kind of people Aaron, Brad, and Evelyn have become is consistent with their birth order positions. They needed that particular mix of siblings to develop the personal characteristics they did. They would not have become the same people if they had not had each other.

      People often say they can’t understand “how people from the same family can be so different.” What they don’t realize is that each sibling is born into a different family. Each new child needs to create a unique identity, separate from the others. But this new identity is created within a context of those who are already there.

      a. The Family Context

      The people in a family change in many ways between the birth of each child. Their circumstances are different, their emotional life is different, and the world around them is different. These differences mean that each child is treated in a different way by parents and siblings, usually unintentionally.

      In addition to the changes in the family itself between births, each child is born with a unique genetic inheritance and constitutional makeup. This also affects how family members relate to the child, which in turn affects the child’s perception of all that happens in the family.

      1. Circumstantial differences

      Where the family lives, what other relatives and friends are around, how much money is available, and the career stage of the parents are all factors that may change over time and will affect the early experiences of each child.

      The family is, of course, numerically different for each sibling. A child who is born into a household with only two adults in it has a different experience of early childhood than the child born into a household of two adults and three children. Much of the influence of birth order on personality is due to this difference in who is physically present in the household.

      A later child may also arrive when an elderly grandparent is either living with the family or placing many demands on the time and money of the parents as well as adding emotional strain to the family.

      2. Emotional differences

      One of the greatest determinants of a child’s personality development is the happiness level of the parents. The personal and marital fulfillment and contentment of the parents may be at a different level at each child’s birth, and this will affect how they are as parents as well as the emotional atmosphere in the home.

      A newly wed couple may be more loving to each other than a disillusioned couple suffering from the seven-year itch. A younger couple may still be working out their differences and power struggles and adjusting to each other, while an older couple may have made their peace with each other. A struggling student couple or a couple concerned about getting a career started will be different kinds of parents at that stage than they are when more established and comfortable.

      The parents of later-born children have usually settled into their social roles and are more secure in their career directions. For each succeeding birth, the current family members bring a higher level of maturity