But the sex of the oldest and the sex and number of siblings who follow the oldest play a crucial role in the final personality development, as the following two chapters on oldest brothers and oldest sisters illustrate.
a. General Characteristics
From ancient times, the oldest child has had a special significance in the family — and in the world. This special significance has meant everything from inheriting the kingdom to being offered as a sacrifice in religious rites, which is a good metaphor for the mixed blessings of the oldest.
The oldest child — the first child — is like a first love. The relationship between the first child and parents can never be duplicated. It is replete with the awe and wonder of having brought into the world this little being, the focus of the parents’ dreams and hopes. Even if later children become more favored by the parents, the relationship is usually not as intense as with the first child.
For the first few years, oldest children receive the full, undiluted force of their parents’ love, fears, and expectations. The parents are usually very excited about the birth of the first child (unless it came too early in the marriage or was the cause of a “shot-gun wedding”) and look forward to it with eager anticipation mingled with fear.
Even before the birth, the first pregnancy elicits more excitement and more anxiety than later pregnancies. Prospective first parents usually worry at a minimum about the health of the mother and fetus, what to expect during delivery, whether the baby will be whole and normal at birth. And these concerns are not unfounded. The first is usually the most difficult labor, averaging 14 hours compared to 8 hours for later births, and there are more difficulties with delivery and more abnormalities in newborn firsts.
After the birth, the new parents worry about what kind of parents they will be and whether their child will develop normally.
The parents pay close attention to everything that happens with the first baby — the first smile, the first word, the first step are all exclaimed over, celebrated, and recorded in the baby book. Everything is special and wondrous. This feeling about the oldest child’s accomplishments can go on for life, through first graduations, marriage, birth of grandchildren, and so on. Later-born children are taken for granted more, and each successive child usually receives less attention and praise for these routine accomplishments.
Parents are more likely to see their first child as a reflection of themselves so they push the oldest to excel. Oldests usually do walk and talk earlier and are toilet trained sooner than later children in the family.
An oldest boy often has the additional burden of being his father’s alter ego even to the point of being given the same name and being expected to follow in father’s footsteps whether his feet fit them or not.
But the first child is also the grand experiment. The parents don’t really know what they’re doing. As one playwright said, “Children ought to be like waffles; you throw away the first one.” The parents want desperately to do well with the first one, but their lack of experience makes them more anxious and tense about their parenting, and this is communicated to the child. The parents are often overprotective and too indulgent with their first, while at the same time they have high expectations and often punish the child for not living up to their demands.
Even if the effects are mixed, oldest children have the benefit of the exclusive attention of their parents for several years. Then, just when they have become accustomed to their privileged position with their parents, they are displaced by a new baby. When this displacement comes between the age of 18 months and 4 or 5 years, it is an extreme shock to the oldest child. After 5 years, the oldest has a place in the world outside the family and a well-established identity, so is less threatened by the newcomer.
For the first child who is under 5 years old, the birth of a second child changes everything. Parents suddenly become less available and apparently less interested in the oldest child. Their attention and energy focus on the new little thing in the crib. The behavior of the oldest starts being judged more harshly, and the parents’ love seems to become more conditional.
The oldest who does fairly well with this transition has usually found a way to connect better with dad at this point. This is, of course, dependent on dad being physically and emotionally available. If, in the process of “losing” mom to the newborn, the oldest can get more time and attention from dad, then the arrival of a new sibling is not a total loss. If this happens when the oldest is becoming aware of and more oriented to the world outside the home (usually dad’s domain in our society), the shift can fit nicely with the child’s own developmental needs and interests.
Oldests are often confused following the birth of a sibling. They don’t understand what is happening to their world. They feel abandoned at first, then jealous. What they thought was theirs is no longer theirs in the same way. No matter how well the parents have prepared them for the baby, they usually don’t see any need for more children in the family, especially helpless, feeble ones who can’t even play with them. They wonder why their parents weren’t satisfied with them. Why do their parents need another one?
The usual reaction when the baby has been home for a few days is “Send that kid back where he came from.” And oldests don’t get over these feelings easily, even if the feelings go underground after a while. In their book Siblings Without Rivalry, authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish suggest imagining that a husband comes home one day and tells his wife that he’s going to be bringing home a new young wife to join their family — someone she can play with and is sure to love. When the younger woman arrives, he spends all his free time helping her get adjusted to her new home and playing with her. He gives her some of his first wife’s clothes and jewelry, and asks the first wife to look after her while he’s at work. How would this feel to you if you were the wife?
That husband may continually reassure his first wife that he still loves her, and he certainly wouldn’t ask her to leave, but most wives in western cultures would still have trouble accepting this situation. Yet parents expect their oldest child to be mature and understanding about it when they bring home a second child. The first child doesn’t want to give up any of the parents’ love and attention any more than the first wife does, and will do what is necessary to compete with the intruder.
At first the oldest may try to regain attention by reverting to baby-like behavior and demanding a bottle or asking to sleep in a crib. If that doesn’t work, the oldest may have temper tantrums or become hostile and aggressive, particularly toward the baby. Stories of the violent actions of oldest children against their next youngest sibling are legion — the stick poked in the eye, the push off the change table, the dropped baby. This, of course, makes the parents angry at the oldest and even more solicitous of the youngest.
...once I discovered my little sister sleeping peacefully in [my favorite] cradle. At this presumption on the part of one to whom as yet no tie of love bound me, I grew angry. I rushed upon the cradle and overturned it, and the baby might have been killed had my mother not caught her as she fell.
Helen Keller, Story of My Life
However, in most families this behavior doesn’t work either, so the oldest tries another way to get the parents’ attention. This leads to one of the common patterns of oldest children: they try very hard to be good (or perfect) so that their parents will continue to love them rather than their “replacement.” They become helpful with the baby in order to earn love. They may become like deputy parents. They give up trying to get what they want for themselves and do what the parents want. Their parents naturally appreciate the new cooperativeness of the oldest and reinforce it by telling the oldest that he or she is bigger and smarter than the newborn and therefore superior. Even though the newborn now gets most of the parents’ attention, the oldest gets their approval for being whatever they mean by “good” — quiet, tidy, responsible, helpful, nurturing,