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Modern Day Dad finds an article about a recent study which determines the first borns get all the brains. I have heard this before and never thought it held too much weight even though it did seem that way. My older sister was a whiz kid and graduated 2nd in her high school class, then off to Stanford University. Me, well I didn’t get much for brains but I like to say I got all the looks, or the athletic ability. My sister now is an Attorney at a law firm in Florida.

I scan all the people I know, and it’s funny how the older children always seemed to do better academically.

Well besides just plain observation the study also found:

First-born children possess IQs that are 2.3 points higher, on average, than their younger siblings, a new study contends.

This finding held true even when first-born children didn’t survive and a younger child was reared as the eldest, scuttling the idea that genetics determines the difference in IQ among siblings, according to the Norwegian researchers who authored the report, published in the June 22 issue of the journal Science.

“This study really puts to an end a debate that’s been going on for more than 70 years,” said Frank J. Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Institute of Personality and Social Research, and the author of an accompanying commentary in the journal. “The theory of biological differences is pretty much dead as a doornail.”

So whether you think it has to do with genetics think again. There is something that is learned by the first born that pushes them to excel. Could it be they are more independent as they don’t have an older sibling to look after them? Could it be they are the first child to discover things on their own, rather than being shown by an older sibling?

One theory:

“Indirectly, it supports the theory that social support and attention within the family explain the difference. First children will not have to share this attention at first. The more children, the less attention will be provided to each child if parental resources are limited,” he added.

Another:

Sulloway noted that there are several theories that might explain the difference in IQ between first-born and younger siblings. Among these is one that says that more money is spent on the oldest child, and, as family size increases, less money is available for other children, leaving them with less opportunity. “But this doesn’t intuitively strike me as the explanation,” he said.

And:

Another theory holds that the first-born child gets more of the parents’ attention, but Sulloway also discounts this theory.

Another theory shotdown:

Still another explanation is that older children teach younger children, and the act of teaching raises the IQ. “The problem with this theory is that teaching has to raise the IQ of the first-born more than it does the IQ of younger siblings, in order to produce a birth order difference,” he said.

How about niche partitioning? Sulloway seems to like this theory:

A theory that Sulloway likes is called “niche partitioning.” This theory suggests that once a role in the family is filled, others have to find roles that help them compete for attention in the family.

Sulloway noted that first-borns are judged to be more disciplined and more hard-working and more intelligent than their younger siblings. “The explanation for this is that first-borns occupy the role of a surrogate parent in the family,” he said. “It is a great way to get brownie points from parents.”

Because older children already occupy that niche in the family, younger children have to find other roles to play, Sulloway said. “So, younger siblings look for other things to be good at,” he said. “It may be that that extra 2.3 points in IQ reflects an investment of time to get that, and the later-born is investing that time in something else and is getting 2.3 extra points in something else,” he added.

Given that each child is finding his or her own niche, the difference in IQ is nothing for parents to worry about, Sulloway said.

No matter what theory we go with, I wouldn’t necessarily put all of our eggs in one basket. Maybe the combination of all of these factors intertwined into which ones seem to weigh more heavily depending on situational factors will probably determine the overall outcome of a child. But either way, it doesn’t tell us the future of the child, just the predetermined capabilities of them.

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