i came across a programme on tv last night about middle child syndrome & watched in fasination. it was saying how birth order can affect your personality. older children tend to be confident & strong, they are the most antisipated & exciting for the parent. they are like the trile run at parenting, everything they do is a first & is exciting, plus they get full attention & time from the parents. the first born tend to be high achievers who like everything there own way. the tend to have more responsibility on there shoulders but have more restrictions. middle children grow resentful of all the parental attention given to the eldist & baby of the family & often feel left out. parents tend to be much more relaxed, less anxious & less demanding of the second + children. middle children tend to have to compete more for attention & try a little harder to be heard or get noticed. middle children crave the family spotlight & feel they do not get as much praise for learning to do things like tying a shoe lace. they often feel forgotten & unapreciated, often like they are on the outside looking in saying "hay i'm here have you forgot about me?" the youngest is basicly spoilt rotten but often feel as though they are completely babied & are never able to feel independance. the did a studdy & concluded by saying that the middle child gets less time with the parents, has less money spent on them, is more likely to be rebelious, is less likely to go to university, less likely to be put in private school & often resents the role given in the family. i just wondered what you guys think, what did you feel in the family, what were your roles? did you feel like the responsible one always having to teach & look after your younger sibs? did you feel like you were never part of the family, an outsider always looking in? did you feel you were the diplomat, always trying to keep the peace? or did you never get any independace but had a lot more free reign within the family? i am one of the middle ones, i have two older sister & a younger brother. my two older sisters are much older than me, Kaz is the eldist at 30, Jo is 28, i'm 22 & my bro 19. because of the age gap between my sisters & me i dont think there was middle child syndrome as such but i did feel like i had to compete alot for attention. i am the rebellious one out of us all & very much felt like the black sheep of the family. i do have to shout to get heard other wise i do just get ignored & forgot about, still even now i have to say "what about me, why dont you ask what i think & what i want to do?". i think being the third girl was very hard for me, even tho my parents loved us all the same it was like i had a lot more work to do to get attention & be recognised. my two older sister had alot of responsibility put on there shoulders, dad was still at college & working, mum had to go out & work when my bro was 2y/o so my sisters did spend a lot of time looking after us. my brother, he's had it easiest of us all. my mum so much wanted a boy, when he came out my mum didnt believe he was a boy & had to check all the time for his boy bits to make sure he was actually a boy. been the only boy & the youngest he got a way with blue murder & i got the blaim for alsorts that he did. even tho my mum & dad says that there are no favourites my brother was treated a lot different to us girls. he was very much babied & still is. do you think you treat any of your kids different? i know most parents dont like to admid to treating their kids differently or having favourites but there have been many studdies to show that actually kids do get treated different according to birth order.
My middle child (or actually middle girl, as gender has something to do with it. We have a 20 year old (girl) an 18 year old (girl, middle child) a 15 year old (boy, so things are different) and a 7 year old (girl) who is the baby. My middle child is Misery personified. (She's a teenager, so you would think that was normal....) Thing is, she was as a toddler, in a funny way. One of her funniest nicknames was "Miser-a-Boo" (her other nickname was "Boo") and that was before either her little brother or baby sister was born. I had people telling me "Moon has Middle Child Syndrome, and she's the youngest." I wonder what that means?
I agree that it's a very real thing, but different in every family. In my family growing up, I think we all had "middle child syndrome" (except maybe the oldest, my sister). My parents had a girl, boy, girl, boy, and we're all 2-2.5 years apart. I'm the second daughter, 3rd child. The interesting thing in our family though was the way we paired off. My older brother and sister have always been really close, and I've always been really close to my little brother. But I feel like I barely know our older siblings, and my little bro's said the same. Which is especially weird now, since it's been a year and a half since I left Oregon and saw him, but he's lived all that time in the same town as the other two. Weird family. Sorry, that was a little OT....
I have middle child syndrome but I was the first baby my mom had that lived so I was raised as a first child. (She miscarried before me.)
Perhaps this is partially true within some families, but I know for a fact not all. My oldest sister, who is only a half sister and 12 years older than me, gets extremely jealous if something is given to either me or my other sister(such as school clothes when we were still in elementary/junior high and she already had graduated) but she doesn't really crave a lot of attention from the rents, but still she is the epitomy of a brat. My full sister, who is 2 years older than me, acts like the "middle child" in some sense. She craves attention basically 24/7. She is not responsible and she lacks ambition. You could call her downright mean. She is the epitomy of an even bigger brat. Then there is me, the angel...hehe I kid. I'm the most indepedent of the three and it's always been that way. I don't need attention and I guess in someother retrospect you could consider my personality more of a "older child" I too could be considered a brat I guess though... Yup, this study could equate a strange loop in my family.
No, it isn't "fact" it is a theory about how SOME families are organized. There cannot be written in stone "fact" about familiy structure, much less feelings of people in these families, because every family is different.
I'm an only child,they always forget about us in those studies. My husband is the youngest of four and is completely spoiled, his mother has actually apologized to ME for it,lol.
i have a friend who is a middle child, as well as the only boy, and I can definitely see all of this in him. He has a lot of issues with his parents, and I can see a lot of it coming from this... He has always felt left out, and lately he gets really upset because he wishes he was closer to his parents, like his sisters. but they still hardly pay any attention to him. Its also just the kind of people they are, but both of his sisters are extremely spoiled, and he just kinda falls out of the picture most of the time.
I'm the youngest of my adopted family (two brothers, their bio kids, above me, but my middle brother was profoundly retarded in mental development and was the baby for all of his life -died in 95. He would have been 44 today.). Since I also had step siblings above and below, I see that "hey, I'm here" pattern.
Wow, I haven't thought about this since I was twelve-ish. I'm the second of four, I guess I have middle-child syndrome, or used to. Once you stop craving attention it stops mattering. My little sister thinks she does, but it's clearly all in her head, perhaps it was all in my head too, but I got over myself. My older sister is 19, she went to college last year. She was always extremely independent, but very non-rebellious. I'm also very independent, but still crave more indepencey and freedom causing more rebellion from me than any of my siblings. My younger sister, 10, I don't get along with. I'm pretty sure that she thinks her and I are "competing" when I'm just existing and she's trying to match me. My brother is 7, not too spoiled, he gets a lot of attention and is extremely jealous when my mom pays attention to my younger sister, we have more money than when Beth (the 19yo) and I were young, so it's really hard to judge wether or not the younger two are spoiled with stuff. My best friend, who is the youngest and only girl of four, had a very simialr situation, but she's a year older than me so everyone's all "grown up" and another good friend, who is around my age seems to be amidst the starting of a very similar situation, but she's the oldest and all four of them are girls. This might prove something.
i am a middle child, but i dont mind it. i do agree that the oldest is very confident and loves attention and that the youngest gets spoiled. thats the case with my sister and my brother. but i like it because i am very independant and introverted and i dont like alot of attention. when someone is bragging about me i end up turning it around to make it sound like no big deal. i like just being laid back, which is easy for the middle child to be. i gues it makes sence. i am more rebellious cause i guess family life isnt really important to me and i want alot of freedom, probably because my parents didnt spend much energy on me. but i dont mind. i like this middle child syndrome. it makes me happy that i can do my own thing and people wount notice, or pay attention too. if i could switch the order of birth i was in, i wouldnt. i embrace the fact that i am middle born, i guess.
