1/40 - Birth Order

When thinking about lessons learned that represent each year of my life, thinking about my first year had a couple of different routes it could have taken. I thought about stories I heard from my parents about the challenges of being first-time parents. I thought about pictures that I've seen from that year and the people in them.

But when I really dug into what my first year gave me that I still think about and use to this day, I thought about being the firstborn in my family and how much I've come to see the impact of birth order when I get to know friends, colleagues, and clients to this day.

There are a lot of different historical interpretations of birth order. We see in the earliest texts of the Bible how much birth order mattered. In the story of the twins, Jacob of Esau, Esau was born first and for the most part "acted" the way a firstborn in those days was supposed to. But Jacob, knowing he was at a disadvantage, made up for it in other ways and was known to be more clever and eventually, conniving enough to trick his older twin brother into giving him the "birth-right" of the firstborn.

In the middle ages of history, even up until the twentieth century, titles, wealth, land, and responsibility were first passed down to the firstborn. Every movie of royalty has some level of suspense as to when "an heir will be born" to the leader of the realm.  In the days of the fiefdom, and even up until the industrial age, power was passed down to the eldest as a way to maintain and keep it consolidated within a family.

Prince William is stuck being next in line to the throne after his father's eventual short reign. Prince Harry is doing whatever the hell he wants with Meghan (and a full head of hair.)

But the days of consolidated familial power to the firstborn are over. Or at least they are in my family and in most modern families. I mean, can you imagine how rich how rich Rob Walton would be if he didn't have to split the Walmart family fortune with his three younger siblings? All four Walton children are in the top 10 richest Americans individually.

But more than a consolidation of wealth or power, the way that I have seen and observed birth order have an effect on how life plays out is that knowing if someone has siblings and where they fall in the birth order gives you hints as to how they might make decisions and what there general temperament might be. It is not a science by any stretch of the imagination, but there are patterns that help.

In my experience, here are a few of the things I've observed.

• First Borns: Frequently try and lead, even if now one follows at first because at first, they are all on their own. Are motivated and often driven by whatever rules were shared with them from the early days of their life. Not prone to update their map of the world unless forced to. Sometimes they wish all the power actually did reside in their birth-right.
• Second Borns: They are born playing from behind and they want everyone to know they have their own way of getting ahead. May start off playing the same game as their older sibling, but will eventually find the rules that benefit their ability to win on their own terms. They're willing to do more work to gain their place in the world.
• Third Borns: Seeing what is already going on amongst their older siblings, and often an immediate passenger on a train of family activity already in motion the moment they arrive, they're really good at going with the flow. Peacemakers by nature, third borns often referee their older siblings, but can also be the winning vote in a battle between the first and second-borns resulting in a judicial approach to some decisions.  

Now those are just generalizations, every one is different because every family is different. The distance between siblings' ages, the involvement of parents, the closeness of cousins - all can tweak the way a birth order changes things. But nothing affects it quite as much as the gender reset of the norms.

What I wrote above is probably most purely seen in a family of all boys or all girls. Where it gets interesting is when you start to get the boy-girl mix like we have in my family.

• Me - Firstborn/First-born Boy: I am pretty steady on the firstborn characteristics above. It took a lot for me to ever update my map of the world beyond the game-play set of rules for right and wrong that I was handed at an early age.
• My Sister (2 years younger) - Secondborn/First-born Girl: My sister is one of my best friends in the world. Now. But not always. She is a born leader (firstborn tendencies) and was always the one organizing her friends but she also very much needed to have her own way in the world (secondborn tendencies) and wanted almost nothing to do with her older brother until I turned 16 and she needed a ride.
• My Brother (5 years younger) - Thirdborn/Second-born Boy: The most complex of the siblings in my family, my younger brother gives off the laid back go with the flow anything might happen and that is okay vibes (thirdborn qualities), but don't be fooled because he is the most competitive person you've ever met (secondborn tendencies.)  From the time he turn 8 years old, it almost didn't matter what game we were playing, we all knew we were playing for 2nd place. But what made it even more infuriating is that his thirdborn-ness made it look like he didn't even care that he beat us all again.
• My Brother (12 years younger) - Fourthborn/Third-born Boy: When he was born, he was undoubtedly the baby of the family and almost had to be go with the flow. But by the time he was out of elementary school, he was an only child on a daily basis and picked up some of the tendencies that might be more traditionally characteristic of a firstborn.  But unlike his older siblings, he has constantly been updating his map of the world, perhaps an advantage of being able to see what worked and what didn't for us.

This is my experience and with my immediate family. But there are enough patterns that I have seen in other families that I have gotten to know over the years that I think knowing if someone has siblings and where they fall in that birth order is a good set of way-points that you can use to think about how you might get to know them better and build a relationship on things you know they might be predisposed to appreciate based on what you know about their birth order and how it interacts with your own tendencies.