If you are an oldest or a middle child, you probably either had some experience caring for younger children or witnessed it. Parenthood may come easily to you and be most fulfilling. You may be inclined to take too much responsibility for or be too controlling with your children; however, you may simply be a good and nurturing caretaker.
If you are an only child or a youngest child, you haven’t had the chance to do or observe any parenting other than what you received, and you may feel overwhelmed by the responsibility “of being a parent” and unsure about how to do it. On the other hand, you are likely to be less overpowering as a parent than an oldest and able, by default, to allow your children quite a bit of autonomy. If you are a youngest, you may enjoy playing with your children more than most parents do.
Helena and Gina were sisters. They grew up together in a small town in Vermont, went to the same schools, and had the same extended family around them. They both married local boys, and they both became single mothers of male only children due to losing their husbands in the war. But the similarities ended there. Helena was five years older than Gina. She had never been in trouble, had always been “responsible,” and had always done what was expected of her. Young Gina was the “rebel” and rarely did what she was supposed to do. As a result, Helena and Gina became very different kinds of parents to their sons. After her husband’s death, Helena never married again or even dated other men. She took her parenting duties very seriously and was highly protective of her son Jeff. She did everything she thought a good parent should do. She stayed in their large family home for Jeff’s sake. She always took him to Sunday School. She did everything for him at home, and when he had a problem out in the world she stepped in to make sure it was dealt with correctly. He lived with many rules and was kept close to home and to his mother for all his growing up years. He had very little private life.
As an adult, Jeff dated quite a bit, but he “never found the right woman.” Any of his more serious relationships tended to be with women much older than himself. He did not develop a career direction of his own and went from job to job, with long periods of not working in between. At the age of 40 he was still living at home with Helena.
Gina dearly loved her son Adam, but did little “for him” other than providing a fairly stable home life. Like her older sister she also worked full time while her son was growing up. After her husband’s death, Gina started dating again and remarried once while Adam was young but got divorced after six months. She decided that she liked dating more than she liked marriage.
She and Adam moved often from apartment to apartment and lived together almost like roommates. While she did exercise some discipline and control over him in his earlier years, by the time he was in seventh grade, they each had their own lives and came and went almost as they pleased. During his adolescence, they barely saw each other. She never asked him about his day or what he was doing. There was a lot of potential for him to get into trouble, but he never did. He was a happy, even-tempered, “good kid.” He got married after finishing college and moved to Boston to begin a career in advertising.
One Christmas, when the two cousins were in their forties, it was decided to have a small family reunion at Helena and Jeff’s home. Adam and his wife and two children and Gina timed their flights from two different cities so they could all be met at the airport by Jeff. On the drive to the house, they went by a bar, which Jeff pointed out, saying “That’s where I went when I was first allowed to stay out after midnight.” Adam asked his cousin how old he was when this happened. Jeff said, “Nineteen.” Turning to his mother in the back seat, Adam said, “You know, I don’t ever remember you telling me a time I had to be home by.” Gina said, “That’s right. I didn’t have to. You were always home before me.”
Helena’s parenting style was typical of oldest siblings who tend to take more responsibility and be more involved with their children. Gina’s style was a more extreme example of how youngests may opt out of the traditional parenting role. As you can see from the results, the birth-order inspired parenting style is not a predictor of how the child will turn out.
In addition to parenting characteristics related to your particular birth order, you may react to one or more of your children out of old patterns of behavior developed in relation to your own siblings. You may favor the child who shares your sex and birth order position, having sympathy and understanding for his or her familiar struggles. Or you may have conflict over the roles if, for example, you are an oldest and you and your oldest child struggle over who is in charge of the younger children. Of course, as an adult, you are in a better position to modify your behavior with your children than you were as a child with your siblings or parents.
Your relationship with a favored sibling while you are growing up may also affect your relationship with your child who is the same birth order and sex as that sibling. You may enjoy that child most as a companion while having the same kind of disagreements you had with your sibling.
Be aware, too, of how a child of yours might remind you of a sibling. Take note of your responses to certain behaviors. Otherwise unexplainable negative reactions to a child may actually reflect an earlier struggle with a sibling. Are your feelings relevant to the situation today or are they a throwback to confrontations of yesterday?
If you are able to be aware of and change, if necessary, the way you relate to your own siblings and parents as a result of your birth order, you will have a better chance of also changing the way you relate to your children.
Sometimes each parent favors a different child, particularly in two-child families where each parent unconsciously takes one child for himself or herself. This is a danger when it creates parent/child allies rather than parent/parent allies.
Chapter 16 discusses in more detail how to use the information about birth order characteristics in your parenting.
e. Your Adult Siblings
Most of this book is about the relationships between siblings as children and how that affects your later relationships with others. How you relate to your siblings as adults is one of those later relationships. Chapter 17 goes into greater detail about how to use your current relationship with siblings as a resource in your own growth. For now, it’s only necessary to mention that it’s not unusual for childhood patterns to continue well into adulthood.
If your parents obviously favored one of their children over the others, that child may be resented and disliked by the others even as an adult. Some siblings continue fighting for the favor of their parents all their lives — even after the parents have died.
If you and a sibling were close together in age, you were more likely to have conflicts than if further apart in years, and those conflicts probably still exist. It may not have been possible to admit those conflicts openly or to deal with them as a child, so they may be hidden, yet still control the way you relate.
Siblings with a greater age gap between them often have fewer, but more openly acknowledged conflicts. Being more aware of the conflicts usually enables those siblings to deal with them and get over them. You are more likely to have fewer conflicts and a closer relationship with a sibling much older or much younger than you.
As you and your siblings get older and more settled and established in your own lives, the minor rivalries and competition from childhood are likely to recede. As older, more relaxed adults you may be able to enjoy sharing your memories and telling the different versions of your growing-up stories.
By learning about the pressures and difficulties facing each of you in your birth order positions, you can better understand why you reacted to each other as you did in childhood. When you see that your “privileged” older sister was undergoing her own sufferings from all the pressure on her, you may feel less angry about the way she bossed you around. When you see that your “spoiled” younger sister felt helpless and inadequate in relation to you, you may feel less resentful of her “easy life.”
f. People At Work
The kind of job you have or the level of career you pursue is determined