The Birth Order Book (7 page)

I also advise parents not to adopt a child who is older than any biological children they already have. The adopted “intruder” may have a negative effect on the child directly beneath him or her. For example, suppose a couple has a 3-year-old child and decide to adopt a child who is 5. What happens? Their 3-year-old has just been knocked off his only-child mountaintop and now has to contend with someone bigger and smarter. Always remember the principle, which applies in this case: generally speaking, we are affected and influenced the most by whoever is directly above us in the family. When an older adopted child comes into a family, he or she is bound to collide with the biological child directly below in age.

We are affected and influenced the most by whoever is directly above us in the family.

So the typical birth order descriptions for onlies, firstborns, middleborns, and lastborns can be modified or even flip-flopped by certain variables over which the children, and usually the parents, have no control. But there are some things over which parents have great control. That’s the subject of the next chapter.

3
What’s Parenting Got to Do with It?
Birth Order Variables—Part 2

W
hat’s parenting got to do with altering birth order descriptions? A great deal. So far, we’ve talked about birth order variables that have to do with the children— spacing, sex, physical or mental differences, multiple births, deaths, and adoptions. But the
parents
are also a major variable. In this chapter we’ll take a closer look at the birth order of the parents, the parent with the critical eye, parental values in general, and what happens in blended families. Parental factors are powerful variables that affect each child in the family, but particularly the firstborn or the only child.

What’s Your Birth Order?

Just how does Mom’s or Dad’s order of birth affect the children? One typical force at work is the tendency for a parent to overidentify with the child in the same birth order position. This can lead to putting too much pressure on the child or spoiling or favoring the child.

For Parents

Good questions to ask yourself:

1. What’s your birth order?

2. Which child shares the same birth order?

3. In what ways do you tend to overidentify with and favor that child?

4. How will keeping this tendency in mind help you balance your actions and responses to all your children?

When I was an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona and was teaching a graduate class in child psychology, I decided to do a “family zoo demonstration” in front of two hundred students, most of whom were employed as teachers or counselors. I brought in a mother, a father, and three children and had an interesting time interacting with all of them in front of the class.

Afterward, when the family had gone, I asked the group for some feedback. Because the majority of those in the class were not neophytes but practicing professionals, I was curious about their reactions. Each had different observations, but most agreed on one thing: “It seems as if you paid an awful lot of attention to the baby of the family—the 4-year-old girl.”

Without thinking too much about it, I said, “Yeah, wasn’t she cute?” But then it hit me. Of course I thought the baby was cute—I had been the baby in my family too! I had made a career of being cute and funny all through school and beyond.

When I interacted with our first three children while they were growing up, whose antics did I enjoy the most? Kevin II—our baby, of course. For example, when Holly was 13 and Krissy was 11 and they would complain to me about 7-year-old Kevey and his pestering ways, I would say, “Well, girls, let’s remember he’s the baby of the family. Little baby brothers do that kind of thing to sisters.” I identified with Kevin. Do you think Holly and Krissy picked up on that? You bet they did.

The Critical Eye Is Hard to Live Under

In my case, I was overidentifying with my lastborn in an indulging way, because, as a baby of the family myself, I loved to pester my older sister and brother when I was small. But let me be clear that overidentification can also be done in a nonindulgent, hard-line way, particularly when both parents are firstborns. This almost guarantees that the parents will have what I call “the critical eye.” Instead of overindulging their firstborn child, they’ll probably be extra hard on him or her as they exert their own exacting standards and learn how to parent at the same time. To show you what I mean, let’s look at the following example:

Family F

Husband—firstborn perfectionist dentist

Wife—firstborn PTA president, known for getting people

organized

Female—16

Female—14

Female—12

Who has the best spot in this family? Obviously it isn’t the firstborn girl for at least two reasons: first, she’s the one Mom and Dad are going to have to practice on as far as parenting is concerned, and second, she will have to perform under their critical perfectionistic eye.

The best position in the family could be the secondborn girl because big sister has run interference for her to some extent and absorbed a lot of the perfectionistic energy that two firstborn parents are likely to pour into their first child. But what about the baby of the family, the thirdborn girl? Will she be able to charm and manipulate her folks? Doubtful, because parents tend to identify with the child nearest them in birth order. Chances are the firstborn dentist and his firstborn PTA president/wife won’t be too enamored with any baby-of-the-family precociousness or manipulation.

Does a Critical Parent Live at Your House?

Here are some signs to watch for.

1. Your child procrastinates at everything she does.

2. Your child draws a picture, then tears it up, telling you it’s no good.

3. Your child redoes his homework several times.

4. A simple half-hour homework assignment takes four hours.

5. Nothing is ever good enough.

6. You redo projects your child does (for example, you make the bed he already made).

What I hope is becoming very obvious to you is that in any family, a lot depends on the personality and parenting style of Mom and Dad. If the parents are authoritarians who come down too hard and too unreasonably on their firstborn, they can turn her into a rebel who, instead of excelling in school as most firstborns would, messes up just to foil the plans of her “perfect” parents.

Remember the two brothers who were in broadcasting who “reversed” roles (see chapter 1)? In the case of these brothers, that variable was a perfectionistic, critical parent who caused Alan to take a step into the background so that Luke thrived and jumped ahead. Luke surpassed his brother and became the functional firstborn.

When people call in to radio shows I appear on, they often tell me, “Doc, I have a firstborn who isn’t doing well at all in school. What can I do to get him motivated?” Often I can pinpoint the problem around mistakes the parents are making with that child. For just one more look at how parenting style can make a real difference, let’s consider another family:

Family G

Female—10

Male—8

The key here is how Dad treats the 10-year-old daughter and how Mom treats the 8-year-old son. Why is that? Because the cross-gender relationships in the family are the most important—mom to son and dad to daughter. If Mom pours too much into the 10-year-old daughter and doesn’t have as much time for the 8-year-old boy, it will ensure that he’ll be very different from big sister. It’s also likely he’ll take the role of firstborn boy and be more aggressive, always ready to protect his turf.

In any family, a lot depends on the personality and parenting style of Mom and Dad.

But if Mom pays lots of attention to her younger son, he’ll become more a baby of the family, fun loving, affectionate, and probably more understanding of women. If he has a healthy relationship with Mom—meaning that she is loving, kind, and gentle but still doesn’t take any guff from him—he will appreciate and respect women and be comfortable around them. As a rule, he will have an excellent chance to build a successful marriage.

But suppose the father has a critical eye and is very demanding and exacting. There is a good chance he could “destroy” his firstborn daughter, and his son will become the true firstborn in the family. Firstborn girls who grow up under a very perfectionistic, critical father are often hard on themselves and put themselves in situations that aren’t healthy as they look for the love, affirmation, and acceptance they didn’t get from their own father. When such a firstborn daughter grows up and marries, her husband will pay the price for the sins of her father.

What Made Lee Iacocca Run?

Parental values are one of the variables that can override almost everything else in birth order. Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Ford and Chrysler fame, is a good example. Lee, a secondborn, has a sister, Delma, two years older. To understand him, however, you have to become acquainted with the values of the Iacocca parents—Italian immigrants who loved their children dearly but were always pushing them to “be the best you can be.”

Lee was the baby of the family but also the firstborn male. As a result, he received all kinds of pressure and prodding to perform, particularly from Dad. For example, in high school Iacocca graduated twelfth in his class of more than nine hundred, yet what did Dad say? “Why weren’t you
first
?” In his biography, Iacocca recalls, “To hear him describe it, you’d think I flunked!”
1

This little anecdote sounds like a father who could ruin his son by always raising the bar too high, but fortunately, Iacocca and his dad were very close. Iacocca recalls, “I loved pleasing him, and he was always terrifically proud of my accomplishments. If I won a spelling contest at school, he was on top of the world. Later in life, whenever I got a promotion, I’d call my father right away and he’d rush right out to tell all his friends. . . . In 1970, when I was named president of the Ford Motor Company, I don’t know which of us was more excited.”
2

Later Iacocca was fired by Ford but went on to mastermind a comeback from the dead for Chrysler. The values taught by his parents, particularly his father, gave him incredible resilience and steely resolve. Iacocca had style and all the tools to be a master CEO—aggressive, decisive, straightforward, compassionate, volatile, funny, and always someone who could tell it like it is. All of those traits could be traced right back to how a firstborn son grew up in a loving Italian home in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Lee Iacocca is only one example of the power of family values. The influence your family has on you as you grow up can reach across time and distance to touch you in profound, and sometimes disturbing, ways years after you think you’ve “grown beyond all that.”

Another good example of how parental values had much to say about making a leader is coach Lute Olson. When Lute came to the University of Arizona, I noticed immediately that he was a sharp dresser with a beautiful head of wavy white hair that was never out of place. The telltale signs of a firstborn perfectionist were there.

So imagine my surprise when I found out that while Lute may look and act like a firstborn or only child, he’s really the baby of his family with three older brothers!

Because I am a fervent Wildcat fan and have even served as counselor to some U of A teams, I got to know Lute. And I couldn’t help myself. I was determined to figure out why he didn’t fit the pattern for his birth order, so I asked him. It turned out he got his meticulous keep-things-organized and everything-in-its-place approach to life from his Scandinavian parents. Lute grew up on a farm where no excuses were accepted if you didn’t do your job. As Lute recalls, “You were expected to give it your best shot.”
3

The influence your family has on you as you grow up can reach across time and distance to touch you in profound, and sometimes disturbing, ways years after you think you’ve “grown beyond all that.”

So that’s what Lute did. No wonder he’s one of the most capable and successful college basketball coaches of all time and that he finally won it all when his Arizona Wildcats took the NCAA crown. Basketball fans may remember the moments just after Lute’s team won the NCAA title and his Wildcat players mussed his hair on national television. For all I know, it was the first time anyone, including his wife, had ever seen Lute with messy hair. It was a moment to remember for many reasons.

Blended Families

What happens when parents become stepparents? Another way to ask this question is, what happens when two families blend because divorced or widowed parents remarry? The answer is,
plenty!
The blended family variable can throw birth order (and the family) into chaos.

With the divorce rate hovering around 50 percent today, the survival of any marriage is in jeopardy. But when you put a divorced mom and her kids together with a divorced dad and his brood, the odds get much larger. Sixty percent of second marriages fail. Simply said, love is seldom lovelier the second time around. That’s not cynicism; that’s real-life statistics.

Yet 1,300 new blended families form every day—and that’s just in the United States. According to the Stepfamily Association of America, 40 percent of all marriages represent a remarriage of one or both parties. If remarriages continue at these rates, 35 percent of all children born will live in a stepfamily by the time they reach 18. And 1 out of 6 children under the age of 18 is a stepchild.
4