The Birth Order Book (9 page)

In order to make their blended family last long term, Mom and Dad need to put their relationship as a couple first and the children second.

In order to make their blended family last long term, Mom and Dad need to put their relationship as a couple first and the children second.

Part of a Bigger Picture

Birth order isn’t a cookie-cutter process that ensures that firstborns will all march lockstep this way, middle children will universally do something different, and lastborns will all be the family comedians. Instead, birth order is designed to give you clues about what an individual is like and what their thought processes and feelings are.

It isn’t hard science that can be measured in a test tube or computed to the tenth power with mathematical formulas. Variables such as when the child is born or the child’s sex give birth order a subjective side. And other variables such as the values taught to the child by the parents—who are certain birth orders themselves—also come into play. All these factors will combine and have a lifelong effect on who and what that person turns out to be. He or she will make a unique individual who will
probably
have certain characteristics typical of his or her birth order, but not necessarily. The end result always has to do with the variables that come into play.

Heat Check

You, as the parent, are the emotional thermostat of your family. You control the temperature of the home.

1. Is it too hot, too volatile? Do children fear sharing their emotions, feelings, and thoughts because of your response when they do?

2. Is your home too cold—not enough interaction, affection, etc.?

3. Does your home swing from hot to cold as you do battle with your kids?

However, just as not everything in life fits perfectly and consistently into a mold, so also birth order doesn’t always fit perfectly and consistently into neat statistical data banks. That’s why some professional colleagues and scholars have turned their sixteen-inch guns on birth order, declaring it’s of little more value than the discredited science of phrenology (figuring out someone’s personality according to the bumps on his or her head).
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Dear Dr. Leman,

My adult daughter was hospitalized due to a terrible auto accident. It left her temporarily blind and discouraged. I decided to spend some of our time in the hospital room reading aloud from The Birth Order Book
.
It not only made my daughter laugh because the book was so true in pegging our family, but it also helped her feel special and one of a kind, and even aided in her recovery. She told me that for the first time, she saw that she had a unique place in our family—she wasn’t just “one of the siblings” anymore. Thanks for helping her—and all of us—make sense of our family.

Miriam, Virginia

In the early 1980s, a pair of Swiss psychologists—Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst—reviewed the results from two thousand birth order research projects and concluded that most of them had been done without enough controls on all the factors involved. They published a book on their studies and at the end concluded, “Birth order influences on personality and IQ have been widely overrated.”
7

A lot of my contemporaries jumped on the Ernst and Angst bandwagon and began saying that you can “overinterpret the importance of birth order,”
8
and that birth order “is significant only in families with more than seven children.”
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But you can’t fool me because I’ve seen the birth order theory play out with great success as I’ve counseled thousands of couples and their children over more than thirty-five years. Does birth order explain everything? No, but it has always proved to be a helpful tool when clients understand it and apply it to their lives.

I’ll never forget the letter I received from a man who runs a beautiful vacation resort in the Northeast. He invited my entire family and me to spend a month with him, compliments of the house, because of what he learned in
The Birth Order Book.
He wrote, “I spent hours in psychiatrists’ offices trying to find out why my brother and I were so different. Then I picked up your book in an airport. By the time I landed, I had the answer.”

What answer did he discover? As the firstborn in his family, he had pursued a typical firstborn career—as a detailed, precise, accurate financial consultant. He even wrote technical financial manuals. His secondborn, baby-of-the-family brother, was carefree, changed jobs at will, and couldn’t save money because he was a big-time spender. People kept asking the older brother, “Why can’t your younger brother shape up and be more like you?”
The Birth Order Book
finally gave him an explanation that made sense.

It Works for Businessmen Too

Mike Lorelli, a former PepsiCo division president who has also held top posts at Pizza Hut and Tambrands, Inc., is a secondborn child who butted heads with an older brother and came out on top in something of a role reversal. While on a business trip, he read
The Birth Order Book
and became a believer in the birth order theory. He offered me an invitation to speak to a group of his top executives.

Today, as a much-sought-after business consultant, Mike still orders
The Birth Order Book
by the case and distributes it to employees and clients. When I asked him why he thought it was such a useful tool, he told me:

Everybody who is important to me was born. And when you think about it that way, you can use birth order to categorize people and try to figure out what’s the best way to motivate your customers, suppliers, consumers, bosses, peers—whoever.

In business it’s not only I.Q. that matters; it’s not necessarily great transactions that matter, but there are a lot of “softer sides” that can make a difference between success and failure. Birth order is one of those. It has, for example, helped me win people over and make them allies on my team to help keep the ship afloat.
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I believe Mike Lorelli is right when he talks about birth order being one of the “softer sides” that can spell the difference between business success and failure. That’s why I do much of my speaking in settings such as the IBM School of Management, the Williams Companies, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, and Cincinnati Financial Insurance Company. I’ve also talked to the Million Dollar Round Table, the Top of the Table, and the Young Presidents’ Organization, where salaries hit well over a million.

Dear. Dr. Leman,

About six years ago I read
T
he Birth Order Book, and since then I’ve used it as instructions and signs to watch for when trying to understand candidates for positions I am trying to fill. I don’t assume someone has to be just as the book suggests, but I watch for the tendencies to be so. . . . Thank you for the wisdom you impart in your books.
11

Bruce Dingman, president, the Dingman Company

I love getting up to address a group of jaded vice presidents and sales managers who rigidly sit there, body language saying in no uncertain terms,
What have they sent us this time?
But a few minutes later the arms and legs relax, and blank faces light up as these high-powered business types get a handle on why it’s so important to understand your own birth order as well as the birth order of people you have to deal with.

Michael C. Feiner, former senior vice president at PepsiCo Europe, has used birth order when filling positions in his firm. Here’s what he told me about how he uses birth order when questioning a prospective employee:

I usually ask one last question: “Can you tell me about your personal background—parents, siblings?” Then I just listen as tons of information begin to pour from the candidate. . . . Because getting things done in a large, complex organization is so dependent on relationships, I probe quite extensively about family relationships and how the candidate carved out his/her own turf with his/her family.
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We’ll talk more about how birth order principles apply to business in chapter 10.

Born to Rebel

As you’ve already seen in this book, there’s no doubt that birth order theory is valuable in the practical world. Yet “experts” have continued to criticize it. However, in 1996 Frank Sulloway, a research scholar in the science technology and society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published
Born to Rebel: Birth Order Family Dynamics and Creative Lives
, a book that contained overwhelming statistical evidence that birth order theory does have credence and validity.

Sulloway had been researching birth order for twenty-six years. Using an approach he calls “meta-analysis” (essentially the combining of many research studies by use of the computer), Sulloway amassed up to a million biographical points of information on more than 6,500 people who have lived in the last 500 years. Included were 3,890 scientists who took part in 28 scientific revolutions. Sulloway also studied hundreds of people involved in the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, as well as participants in 61 American reform movements.
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For instance, here are some of the historical figures he discusses in his book: firstborns Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, Jesse Jackson, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (an only child); middleborns Yasser Arafat, George Bush, Fidel Castro, Napoléon Bonaparte, Henry VIII, Patrick Henry, and Adolf Hitler; lastborns Ho Chi Minh, Ronald Reagan, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Voltaire.

In the fields of science and philosophy, Sulloway mentions firstborns Albert Einstein, Galileo, and Leonardo da Vinci (only child); middleborns Louis Pasteur, Albert Schweitzer, and Charles Darwin; lastborns Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes. Copernicus, you will recall, was the scientist who introduced the revolutionary idea that the world was not flat but indeed round and revolved around the sun— he was the youngest of four children. Charles Darwin, the proponent of evolution, and his disciple, Alfred Russell Wallace, were both the fifth of six children.

Although there are areas where I don’t agree with Sulloway, he did a masterful job in disputing the claims that birth order is all hocuspocus and worthless speculation.
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The bottom line to all of Sulloway’s mental toil (it makes this baby of the family tired just to think about it) is this: down through history, firstborns have been the ones who were conservative and willing to stick to the status quo and tradition, while laterborns were the ones who wanted to change things and even start revolutions. According to Sulloway (who is a laterborn himself), laterborns are more open-minded than firstborns. They are “born to rebel”—willing to take risks and do away with sacred cows.

None of Sulloway’s findings concerning the characteristics of firstborns and laterborns were news to me. They fit right in with what I’ve been saying for more than thirty-five years. And as you keep reading
The Birth Order Book
, the characteristics of the birth orders will make sense to you too. You’ll have those “aha” moments where you say, “So
that’s
why I do this, . . . why he does that. Now I get it!”

I guarantee it.

4
First Come, First Served
Firstborns

I
t’s time to take a closer look at firstborns—officially defined as the oldest in the family. But don’t forget the variables we just covered in chapters 2 and 3. Firstborn personalities can also be created by being the oldest of your sex, having a five-year (or more) gap between you and the child above you of the same sex, or achieving a role reversal and taking over the firstborn privileges and responsibilities.

If you are a firstborn (or an only child),
1
you are a much different person than you would have been had you been born later. If you are a laterborn, realize that a lot of things would be different—and so would you—had you been born first.

The Four-Corner Birth Order Exercise

In my family and parenting seminars, I start by asking attendees to join one of four groups: only children in one corner, firstborns in a second, middleborns in a third, and lastborns in a fourth. Then I tell the groups, “Just chat a bit but remain in your circle.”

Casually I move from one group to another and leave a piece of paper facedown in the center of each group. The papers contain identical instructions:

Congratulations! You are the leader of this group. Please introduce yourself to the others in your group, then have each person do the same. As you talk together, make a list of personality characteristics that you all seem to share. Be prepared to report back to the rest of the seminar with your composite picture of yourselves. Please start to work immediately.

I return to the front of the room, and all the groups keep waiting for me to give some kind of verbal instructions, but I say nothing. Instead I pretend to look busy as I leaf through papers, waiting for “birth order nature” to take its course. Who will pick up the piece of paper first? Almost invariably, a person in the only and firstborn groups picks up the paper and reads the instructions. Someone in the middleborn group soon follows suit. In no time, three groups in the room are busy with their assignments.