FIRSTBORN CHILDREN
Many people believe that firstborn children, because
of their privileged position in the family, behave dif-
ferently than later-born children. Although parents,
siblings, and nonparents probably overemphasize the
influence of birth order, evidence suggests that the
experiences of individuals are related to their ordinal
position in the family.
Psychologists have studied the distinctive person-
ality of firstborn children for more than a century. Al-
fred Adler, the father of individual psychology,
postulated that the child’s position in the family has
a monumental effect on the child’s personality. He
believed that the firstborn child is dethroned by the
birth of a sibling and the firstborn must now share pa-
rental attention with a rival. In order to cope with this
traumatic betrayal, firstborns become problem chil-
dren or they strongly emulate their parents. Because
of their identification with their parents and their
perceived loss of status, power and authority become
extremely important to firstborn children. Although
Adler’s theory was not based on empirical research,
it spurred thousands of studies that related birth
order to everything from extrasensory perception to
juvenile delinquency.
Many of the commonly held ideas about first-
borns originate from inferences about their interac-
tions with parents and siblings. The extant literature
suggests that parents harbor expectations of how
firstborns should behave and parents act in accor-
dance with those beliefs. During infancy, mothers at-
tend to firstborns by responding to and stimulating
them more than latterborns. Mothers also tend to
rate their firstborn infants as more difficult than later-
born children. This finding may reflect that mothers
feel more comfortable in their parenting role by the
time a subsequent child enters the family. The rela-
tive amount of attention that firstborn preschoolers
receive tends to decline with the birth of siblings.
Nevertheless, firstborn children continue to experi-
ence distinctive relationships with their parents. In-
vestigators have found that parents expect higher
achievement, are more controlling, and make added
demands on their firstborn young children. More-
over, throughout childhood, fathers tend to be more
involved with their firstborns relative to later-born
children.
Firstborns also seem to initiate more interactions,
both positive and negative, with their younger sib-
lings than vice versa. They are more likely to engage
their younger siblings in conversation, but they are
also more likely to be verbally disapproving. As com-
pared to older peers, firstborn children tend to in-
struct younger siblings by providing appropriate
feedback and guidance. The opportunity to be a
‘‘teacher’’ may help explain why firstborn children,
on average, have higher IQs than only or youngest
children.Speech and Intelligence
Firstborn children are temporarily only children
and thus are exposed to one-to-one speech with their
parents. When a new child is born, firstborns and
their siblings receive less child-directed speech and
are privy to multiparty speech. Specifically, mothers
appear to provide more linguistic support and more
complex grammatical statements to their firstborns
even when their firstborns and latterborns are ob-
served at the same age. Concordantly, firstborn tod-
dlers have larger vocabularies, reach language
milestones earlier, and demonstrate more sophisti-
cated grammar than their siblings. The early lan-
guage competence of firstborns may partially explain
the proclivity of firstborns to achieve in school. In
contrast, later-born children’s skill in conversational
speech and their expertise in understanding the men-
tal states of others potentially contribute to their re-
nowned social acumen.On average, firstborn children have been cited as
having higher intelligence levels than later-born chil-
dren. For example, one study examined scores on the
1965 National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test
and, regardless of family size, the scores tended to be
higher for firstborns. The confluence model has been
proposed to explain the superior intellectual rank-
ings of firstborns. In this paradigm, a child’s intellec-
tual level depends on the average intellectual level of
all the family members. When a new child is born into
the family, the intellectual environment declines.
This model states that, in general, large families have
impoverished intellectual climates, as there are many
immature minds for several years. Also, age spacing
between siblings is an important variable in this theo-
ry. Small age differences are beneficial to the first-
born in that the firstborn is not exposed to very young
siblings for too long. In addition, the firstborn has the
opportunity to teach siblings, which facilitates the
crystallization of knowledge of the firstborn. Applying
the confluence model, if one could choose an ordinal
position, one would prefer to be a firstborn with a
younger sibling close in age. With its emphasis on av-
erage intellectual atmosphere, the confluence model
has created much debate.
Some of the implications of the theory have not
received support in the literature. For example, addi-
tional adults in the household, such as grandparents,
do not seem to increase children’s IQ as would seem
to be predicted by the confluence model. Further-FIRSTBORN CHILDREN 153