Birth Order: What It Means for Your Kids … and You

"I had to try not to always take Julie's side." Biases can surface no matter what your own birth position was, as Lori Silverstone points out. "As a middle myself, I can be harder on my older daughter. I recall my older sister hitting me," she says of her reactions to her daughters' tussles.

"My husband is a firstborn. He's always sticking up for the oldest. He feels bad for her that the others came so fast. He helps me to see what that feels like, to have that attention and then lose it." Silverstone sees birth-order triggers as "an opportunity to heal parts of ourselves. I've learned to teach my middle daughter to stand up for herself. My mother didn't teach me that. I'm conscious of giving my middle daughter tools so she has a nice way to protect herself."

Whether or not you subscribe to theories that birth order can affect your child's personality, ultimately, "we all have free will," Agati notes. It's important for both parents and kids to realize that, despite the characteristics often associated with birth order, "you're not locked into any role."

RESOURCES

Birth Order Blues: How Parents Can Help Their Children Meet the Challenges of Birth Order, by Meri Wallace, Owl Books, 1999. Wallace focuses on the parents' role in alleviating feelings of inequity among multiple children in a family. Her book also explores the only child and twins.

Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives, by Frank Sulloway, Pantheon, 1997. This book explores how eldest and latter-born children differ in personality because of early competition for their family's love, attention and resources.

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris, Touchstone Books, 1998. Harris sparked considerable debate over her theory that peers are more influential than parents, siblings or birth order.

The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why, by Dalton Conley, Pantheon, 2004. Conley argues that differences among children within a family are more about economic realities than birth order.

Understanding Human Nature, by Alfred Adler, translated by Colin Brett, Hazelden Foundation, 1998. The most recent edition of Adler's book espousing social-truth theory and how the basic human need to be accepted translates in birth order.

Review this list of classic birth-order characteristics.  Do these characteristics match with the members of your family?

Janet Strassman Perlmutter, M.S.W., is a family therapist and freelance writer. She is the only daughter and second oldest of seven children.