This post is taken from the weekly newsletter “Darons Daronnes” on parenting, which is sent out every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. To receive it, you can register for free here.
This week, a friend who had been living in the United States for seven years, passing through Paris, came to my house for an aperitif. I hadn’t seen my children for a while. The eldest, aged 9, spent two hours sunken into the living room chair, reading a book. Astrapi while providing us with inconsistent information from time to time: “Did you know that the cement of the Great Wall of China was made from glutinous rice?” The second one, aged 6, spent two hours hanging around my friend, asking him a thousand questions while fluttering around trying to monopolise his attention. The last one, aged 4, spent two hours digging a hole outside without coming to see us, except to ask for his pacifier.
As we left, my boyfriend told my daughters: “You really are an old man! And you, a caricature of the middle child. » (The youngest was digging his hole.) This friend has three daughters, who seem to fit the pattern described above pretty well.
For the millionth time in my life as a parent, I asked myself this question: Are our children reducible to their place among siblings? Is my oldest daughter studious, quiet, and diligent just because she was the first? Is the second a social freak just because she’s in the middle? And the last one, easy because… last? My first instinct is to fight this idea, because as a parent I find it annoying. My children are wonderful and unique because they are wonderful and unique, I tell myself, and because of their wonderful parents, not because they drew numbers one, two, and three in the gamete lottery!
Then I read a bunch of papers that reinforced my idea that sibling rank has no impact on character. Studies have been conducted in this direction, for example this one, in Germany, the UK and the US in 2015, among 20,000 adults. It shows that there is no significant difference between older and younger people in terms of emotional stability, extroversion, imagination, etc.
Different expectations
But a little voice told me that I was being a bit bad faith anyway. That the moment when we are born, when we come into the family, necessarily has some importance. You may have seen this new expression appear in the American media (including the New York Times) after a TikTok video and a tweet went viral: “eldest son syndrome”: a girl was born and she was the first, without luck.
You have 68.41% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
