don’t need to ask you what you did on August 12. You no doubt
attended your local Middle Child Day parade or took in a lecture
on Famous Middle Children Throughout History, then came home
and cracked open a bottle of Middle Sister wine to celebrate.
(It’s a real product, created “for middle sisters everywhere.”)only ones with a real syndrome.” I cer-
tainly was always aware that the mid-
dle was not a position to be envied,
even as I came to see typical middle-
child traits in myself. Middle children
are natural mediators; I avoid conflict
and habitually act as the family peace-
maker. Middle children tend to be
private but also starved for affection;
I keep to myself but am not exactly
attention-averse.
Mostly, what I learned as a middle
child is that being the middle means
being defined by what you are not.
You’re shaped primarily by what you
missed out on and what you don’t
possess. According to studies, middles
traditionally receive less financial and
emotional support from their parents.
They also typically have less intimate
relationships with their mothers and
fathers compared with other siblings,
so they tend to have more friends,
presumably in compensation.
The list of famous middle children
includes figures as diverse as Warren
Buffett and Jennifer Lopez, but for the
most part, middles are reliably cast in
the culture as oddballs, outcasts, and
misfits. On TV family sitcoms, the mid-
dle child is the misunderstood smart
aleck, whether it’s Lisa Simpson (TheOr maybe you spent National Mid-
dle Child Day contemplating the ex-
tinction of the middle child. Because,
like the mountain gorilla and the
hawksbill turtle, the American middle
child is now an endangered species.
Blame millennials, who are waiting
longer to get married and have chil-
dren. According to a study by the Pew
Research Center, in 1976, 65 percent of
mothers between ages 40 and 44 had
three or more children. Today, nearly
two thirds of women with children
have only one or two. Middle children,
the most populous birth-order demo-
graphic throughout most of history,
will soon be the tiniest.
As a middle child, I am dismayed
at the potential disappearance of my
ilk. I’m the middle of three—two boys,
one girl—so I’m what’s sometimes
referred to as a “classic middle,” as
opposed to, say, the five middle kids
between the oldest and youngest in a
family of seven.
Being a middle child is not some-
thing you aspire to; it’s something that
happens to you. As one middle child
said to me, “There is a thing called
middle-child syndrome. There’s no
official oldest-child syndrome or
youngest-child syndrome. We’re theI
104 september 2019
Reader’s Digest