For instance, you may assume people or events are duplicating the ones you knew as a child when they’re not like that at all. The younger son whose mother and big sister were overprotective and possessive may react resentfully when his wife asks him how his day was. He is so accustomed to women being “domineering” and “snoopy” (according to his perception of his family) that he is automatically angered by an innocent remark. The middle manager who thinks an ambitious young co-worker is trying to undermine her work to win the top boss’s favor may react the same way she did to her younger sister trying to win favor with father. In both cases, the reaction, which is to old hurts, may be inappropriate in the current context and destructive to everyone involved.
It is important, then, to be aware of how your position in your family and your early experiences have shaped you and your relationships with others. Murray Bowen, one of the originators of family systems therapy, often tells therapists that “no single piece of data is more important than knowing the sibling positions of people in the present and past generations.”
g. Purpose of This Book
This book will help you answer, in part, the question “Why am I like this?” The summary of research findings about birth order positions in a family should help you recognize aspects of your own personality and understand their origin.
While it may be comforting to find out that some of your less desirable characteristics were almost inevitable given your sex and birth order, it isn’t helpful to blame your faults on that and give up trying to change. The point of knowing how those characteristics developed is to learn strategies for changing the ones you don’t like. Just because you were born as a youngest or an oldest or an only, you do not have to keep on behaving like one; the traits are not written in stone.
Many of the descriptions in this book are not very flattering. It almost seems that there is no “good” birth order. Each of the birth order positions has characteristics that are helpful and make life easier for the person, and each presents challenges to face.
These descriptions of the birth order positions for each sex report what most people in these positions are usually like according to research studies; they do not say what anyone should be like. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. They simply provide one more framework for looking at yourself and your relationships. (See the appendix for more details on the research.) The most valuable and extensive research has been done by Austrian psychologist Walter Toman, whose book Family Constellation: Its Effect on Personality and Social Behavior (Springer, 1976) is a classic in the field and is highly recommended for your further reading.
For many reasons, some of which are discussed in chapter 15, the description of your birth order may not fit you at all. It may seem about as meaningful as a horoscope reading or a fortune cookie. If this is your experience, first ask someone who knows you well to read the description of your birth order position and see if it fits. We are not always the best judges of our own character. If your outside reader agrees that the description does not fit, you may be interested in finding out why this is so. What aspects of your family situation have affected the development of the usual birth order characteristics?
h. Using The Information
The best way to use the information in this book is to see how your birth order may have led you to think and behave in certain ways. If those ways are working well for you, this can be just an interesting intellectual exercise. If some of the ways you think and act are causing problems for you or others in your life, you may want to use this information as a springboard for making some changes. Since people are most often motivated to make changes when they are dissatisfied, the birth order descriptions here focus on the more troublesome aspects of each birth order position rather than the more positive ones. It’s the troublesome aspects that you will want to deal with in some way; the good times can just keep rolling.
The information about birth order characteristics can also help you understand why others in your life think and behave as they do. It can be very constructive for you to understand that a person’s way of being with you may be related to these standard birth order characteristics and is not just deliberate perverseness on their part. You may be able to accept someone’s behavior more easily when you can say to yourself, “Well, that’s just how oldest brothers of brothers are. He’s like that with everybody; it’s not that he dislikes me.” The next chapter describes some of the ways birth order can affect different kinds of relationships.
Be sure you read only with the intent of using the information to discover how you might want to change in relating to others. It would be a misuse of this information to start labeling those around you as a “such and such” as a way of putting them down or trying to get them to change. As always, in attempts at self-improvement, remember that it’s not self-improvement if you’re trying to improve someone else. It’s difficult enough to change your own behavior; it’s impossible to impose change on someone else. However, if you change the way you act with someone, eventually that person may change in response to your change.
Many therapists prefer to work with the “healthiest” person in a relationship, the one who would appear to need changing the least, because that person has the best chance of successfully making changes. Changes on the part of one person usually alter the way a relationship functions. But don’t make that the goal of your change. Your only goal for change can be for yourself and how you treat others.
Understanding birth order characteristics precedes change, but doesn’t decree change. Knowing that some of your traits are common among people in your birth order position may simply help you see why you feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. You can then decide whether you want to work on being rounder or whether you want to find a squarer hole to fit into.
Elsie, an oldest sister of sisters, had become a secretary because that was the only kind of work open to her as a young woman 30 years ago. She had good skills and good work habits, yet she had been dissatisfied in most of her jobs. She had little respect for the men and women she worked for (especially the women), was unable to be supportive of her bosses, and lost several jobs because of her “attitude.” When she learned about birth order characteristics, it began to make sense that she wouldn’t adapt well to the traditional subordinate role of a secretary. Learning that the fit wasn’t right for her motivated her to look seriously at other kinds of work where her birth order characteristics would be an asset rather than a hindrance.
Elsie might also have made the decision to pay particular attention to those aspects of her birth order characteristics that caused her problems at work and to be aware of when she was acting like an oldest sister rather than a professional secretary. She could then have consciously made the effort not to think of her boss as a younger sister who needed straightening out.
We hope that by learning a little bit about the usual characteristics for your sex and birth order, you will better understand and accept yourself and others in your life.
1. Generally, in this book, the word sex refers to the biological fact of being male or female. Gender refers to the attributes of masculinity or femininity as defined by our culture.
2
How Birth Order Affects Relationships
All marriages are happy. It’s the living together afterward that causes all the trouble.
Raymond Hill
Your birth order and gender affect primarily your social behavior — how you relate to other people in your life. They affect the kind of spouse you are, the kind of parent you are, the kind of employer or employee you are, and the kind of friend you are. Some people, because of their gender and birth order, will have more trouble than others at work, some will have more difficulty being