The Birth Order Book (39 page)

A plaintive cry for help is a great tool lastborns use to get parents (as well as older siblings) to snowplow the roads of life for them.

For example, I worked with one seventh grader whose older brother was in his final year of high school. The parents sent this little redhead to me in the spring of his seventh-grade year because he was doing so poorly in school. The boy was the lastborn of two children.

At first we didn’t make much progress. The boy was in all kinds of trouble at school, and the parents were going to more conferences than they really wanted to be bothered with. He managed to pass seventh grade, but not by much. I continued working with him throughout the summer, and in the fall big brother went away to college. This seemed to be the breakthrough that was needed. As the boy started into his eighth-grade year, he began responding to some reality discipline principles I had set up, and the parents finally saw some positive results.

The reality discipline I asked his parents to use was rather basic:

1. Make the boy stand on his own feet and do not help him with any more of his homework than absolutely necessary.

2. After dinner, no going out to play, no watching television, no doing anything of that nature until responsibilities are taken care of. Responsibilities include chores and certainly schoolwork.

3. No making Mom and Dad tutor for several hours each night. (This went back to making the boy stand on his own feet.)

The lastborn son made an excellent turnaround in the fall of his eighth-grade year. The mis-behavior stopped at school, and his grades came up nicely without a lot of tutoring by Mom and Dad. The youngster had lived in the shadow of his older brother for so long that he had been completely cowed and discouraged. As I often put it, “His candle had been blown out.” The older brother was so confident and competent and so much bigger and stronger that it just left the younger boy wiped out. Once elder brother physically left the house, the younger child began to bloom.

The youngster had lived in the shadow of his older brother for so long that he had been completely cowed and discouraged.

And Mom and Dad were relieved when they didn’t have to spend three or four hours a night tutoring their lastborn to keep his grades barely above water. Once the son understood that he had the ability and could do it himself, everything changed.

I Just Didn’t Like School

I have also counseled lastborn children who just don’t care for school. I understand where they’re coming from because I felt the same way when I was growing up. Sometimes a child has learning problems or disabilities, but in many cases the true issue is attitude.

I’m convinced my disastrous school record could have been greatly improved with one simple step on the part of my parents. My mother should have stopped running down to the school to talk to the counselors. She should have stopped trying to find the cause of little Kevin’s problems. If she had simply said, “Hey, kid, no Little League unless you cut it in school,” I probably would have turned around by the sixth or seventh grade.

But Mom and Dad never called my bluff. They never drew the line. In a word, they were permissive, and I played it for all I could. For example, I had a strange ailment called Monday and Friday stomachaches. I would wake up on Friday feeling terrible, and, of course, I couldn’t go to school. But strangely enough, by mid-afternoon a miracle had happened. I was instantly healed when the clock struck three! I remained well throughout Saturday and Sunday, but then on Monday morning, back would come that stomachache.

There are other names for my illness. One might be “making the weekend longer by faking a stomachache on Fridays and Mondays.” But somehow my mom never really caught on. I guess she just couldn’t believe her little Cub could lie and be in such “pain” at the same time.

Another trick I mastered was finding something “important” to do when there was work to be done.

Another trick I mastered was finding something “important” to do when there was work to be done. The dishes would be looming mountainously in the sink and the garbage cans and wastebaskets would be overflowing, but I let none of these mundane temptations keep me from what I felt I had to do—right at that very moment.

What or who spoils the lastborn? The obvious answer is, “Why, the parents do the spoiling, of course.” And that’s correct to a point, but sometimes parents can get a lot of help from the other children in the family. How spoiled a lastborn gets can depend on when and where he or she arrives in the family zoo. For example, let’s diagram a family consisting of three girls and a lastborn boy:

Family M

Female—11

Female—9

Female—6

Male—3

In this family it looks as if the little guy is totally outnumbered by females. But what can usually occur here is a strong relationship between the mother and the son. After three girls, little Harold will be very precious, especially to Mom, and she is likely to give him the benefit of the doubt when older sisters come and complain about his pestering.

Actually, this family has two lastborns, a lastborn boy and a lastborn girl. This almost guarantees friction between the 6-year-old and the 3-year old. In this kind of family, it is very common for alliances to form. The way that will probably happen in this particular sequence is that the 11-year-old will form an alliance with the 6-year-old, and the 9-year-old with the 3-year-old.

In many cases the thirdborn child in this family could find herself in an unfavorable position. This would be especially true if both of the older girls decided to really mother the little boy and take his side in all of the various arguments and incidents that occur in a family of four. On the other hand, all three of the older girls may decide that the little guy is a pest and be particularly irritated if Mom asks them to do a lot of babysitting.

Let’s take another look at a family where the lastborn becomes very special. In this case we have a firstborn girl followed by two boys, and finally along comes “baby princess.” The diagram looks like this:

Family N

Female—13

Male—12

Male—10

Female—4

On the positive side, the lastborn girl is in good shape in that she has two older brothers who are likely to wind up becoming her champions, unless she is a total little brat. With two attentive older brothers, she can grow up learning that men are caring and loving. And with the older sister, she also gets the benefit of more mothering and cuddling, something that firstborn girls love to do.

The bad news is that the baby princess can get the idea that the world revolves around her. She may become the apple of Daddy’s eye and be able to wrap him around her little finger to get just about anything she wants. If this is carried too far, she can grow up believing she can do this with any man, and be a risky candidate for a happy marriage.

If parents are overly permissive, baby princess could be spoiled rotten. She could grow up to be an obnoxious adult who makes unreasonable demands on everyone.

How to Grow a Total Weakling

One of the most damaging effects of parental permissiveness is making things too easy for a child. Later, when the lastborn has grown to adulthood, he or she may not be prepared for real life. Adversities will just be too much.

I once worked with a family that consisted of a mother (a widow) and 7 children. There were 3 daughters, then 3 sons, and then the youngest daughter, who was 7 years behind the youngest son. The father had died when the youngest daughter was 13. At the time I counseled the family, the youngest daughter was 26 and totally dependent on the mother. For 13 years the mother and the youngest daughter had virtually lived alone together because the rest of the children had moved out of the house by the time the father had died.

The daughter had been totally protected and smothered by her mother to the point that when I saw her, she was uneducated and her confidence was at zero. The most challenging tasks she could attempt were housecleaning and babysitting.

I realize this is an extreme case of the parent needing the child so badly that she didn’t allow the child to grow up. But the same thing happens to a lesser degree every time the parent acts permissively and does too much snowplowing of life’s roads for a child. When a parent babies a child too much, the parent actually renders that child useless, or at least cripples him or her in one way or another.

The Other Side of the Lastborn Coin

One thing I’ve tried to emphasize throughout this book is that no birth order fits only one mold. The same characteristics are not always true in every lastborn child. Those ever-present variables can throw in a lot of curveballs for lastborns, as well as any other birth order. In fact, Sande and I have seen the variable of spacing working overtime in our “second family”—Hannah, born nine and a half years after Kevin II, and Lauren, born five and a half years after Hannah.

Hannah’s official description is “firstborn in the second family,” but I describe her as a compliant firstborn who acts more like a baby of the family than anything else. It’s important to remember that for the first five years of her life— that period when her lifestyle was really formed—Hannah was the lastborn in the total Leman family. She was also the beneficiary of a lot of loving care from what amounted to five parents—Sande and myself, of course, and her older siblings, all of whom came across to her as very big, very capable, and very loving.

We doted on Hannah more than a little bit, and it took all of our determination and experience to apply reality discipline to balance things up and not let her become spoiled. When we’d go to University of Arizona basketball games or other public events, we would sometimes take Hannah along, and all our friends would hold her and cuddle her. Today Hannah is a very balanced, well-adjusted, fun-loving 22-year-old, who is extremely well liked, loves school, and loves her teachers. She has always wanted to be a teacher and has just graduated with a degree in special ed. Her heart is for Africa and the underprivileged. Our baby of the family in many ways, our little surprise child has a determination that is wonderful and will take her far.

As for Lauren, she definitely is the “caboose” of the Leman family(ies). But while she’s the ordinal baby of them all, she really acts more like a firstborn or only child than anything else. Lauren is extremely thoughtful, analytical, and cautious—a sure sign of an only child or firstborn. I’m not sure why she’s so cautious—maybe she just had too much adult influence with all those “big people” above her. Keep in mind that if Hannah has had five parents, Lauren has had
six
. She was born when Hannah’s lifestyle had been thoroughly formed, and even at the age of 5, Hannah came across to her baby sister as very capable, strong, and all-knowing.

Earlier I mentioned that Lauren amazed her lastborn father at the age of 2 with the way she would line up her little cassette tapes on the floor in nice neat rows, and then play them one at a time. But perhaps the most significant incident of them all happened one day when I found Lauren down on the floor with one of 7-year-old Hannah’s computer toys, which was designed to help her learn to spell, do math, and read. At the age of 2½, Lauren had figured out how to turn it on, and the computer toy said, “Hello! Please select a category now.”

While youngest children are often coddled and cuddled, they can get more than their share of being cuffed and clobbered, especially by older brothers and sisters.

The toy, appropriately named Whiz Kid Plus, was designed with a time delay. If no command was given, the voice would repeat the instruction. Lauren hadn’t seen me come in, so I watched my little daughter as she sat there listening to the toy continuing to tell her, “Hello! Please select a category now.”

What’s she going to do?
I wondered. Finally, after this was repeated several times, Lauren leaned down to the machine, cupped her hands, and said loudly, “Lady, I can’t! I’m only 2 years old!”

At that moment I realized that my little girl was 2 going on 22, and we had a quasi–only child, or at least a functional firstborn, on our hands.

Lastborns Get Set Straight a Lot

These Leman second-family exploits are inserted here only to illustrate that lastborns can turn out in many different kinds of packages. You may be a lastborn who wasn’t spoiled that much at all. Or maybe your youngest child is hardly what you would call a manipulator. If anything, your lastborn is the one being manipulated by the rest of the family. Ironically enough, while youngest children are often coddled and cuddled, they can get more than their share of being cuffed and clobbered, especially by older brothers and sisters.

Birth order specialists claim youngest children have difficulty with “information processing.”
1
In other words, they seem to have trouble getting things straight. The older kids always seem to be so smart—so authoritative and knowing. No matter that the older kids are often totally incorrect in their dogmatic pronouncements to the baby of the family— the baby
perceives
they are right because they are so much bigger, stronger, and “smarter.”

As a lastborn, I can remember feeling plenty stupid when Sally or Jack set me straight on anything from the facts of life to the time of day. My big brother, Jack, five years older, had a very direct approach for setting me straight: he’d belt me one.

Of course, I often had it coming. I was a pro at setting Jack up by goading and pestering him until he’d lose his cool and hit me. Then I’d scream bloody murder, and Mom or Dad would get on his case. It was great fun, but there was a high price tag. Sooner or later Jack would get me alone where I couldn’t frame him or convince my parents that it was all his fault. Of course he never really killed me. It just felt like it as he pounded on me a little for the sake of general principles.