Simpsons) or Alex Dun-
phy (Modern Family).
Then there are Peter and
Jan Brady of The Brady
Bunch, the middles in
their respective gender
troikas.
Poor Jan, sandwiched
between perfect Marcia
and adorable Cindy,
became pop culture’s
most enduring em-
bodiment of the mid-
dle child, a character
so epically persecuted
by her birth-order
status that her cri de
middledom—“Marcia,
Marcia, Marcia!”—could
be the Latin motto em-
blazoned above the
family crest of Middle
Children.
In a study conducted by the City
College of New York in which partici-
pants were asked to choose words they
associate with first, last, and middle
kids, positive attributes such as caring
and ambitious were cited in reference
to all three birth orders. Only middles,
however, were described with such
negative terms as overlooked and
confused. More significantly, middles
were the only birth order to which no
one applied the term spoiled. Middles
may be many things, but they are not
overindulged.
The true evidence, though, comes
from middles themselves. Candace, the
HISTORY’S LARGEST
BIRTH-ORDER
DEMOGRAPHIC WILL
SOON BE THE TINIEST.middle of seven, told me, “Nobody took
baby pictures of me—which I didn’t re-
alize until I was in my 40s and asked for
them. That was a strange, awful discov-
ery.” As Bruce Hopman, the founder of
the International Middle Child Union
and a classic middle child, pointed out
to me, Abel—Adam and Eve’s middle
son and the brother to Cain and Seth—
was both history’s first middle child
and history’s first murder victim.
It’s possible, of course, that the en-
tire theory of birth-order attribution
is overblown. Many psychologists
discount it altogether. While oldest
kids may grow up to be CEOs (theyrd.com 105Family