is helpful in understanding why your parents and their siblings and their own parents relate to each other in certain ways. For example, if you are the youngest sister of sisters, you may have a wonderful relationship with your oldest-sister-of-sisters grandmother and be bewildered at the enmity between her and your father who is an oldest brother of sisters. It could be that their non-complementary positions make it difficult for them to understand each other.
If your birth order is neither the same as nor complementary to either of your parent’s, you may feel somewhat isolated in your family. You could be a birth order “misfit” in their experience, which might make it difficult for your parents to know how to relate to you. For example, if you are the youngest brother of brothers and both your parents are the oldest siblings of sisters, neither has had a younger brother and neither knows what it’s like to be a youngest.
2. Learning to relate to the opposite sex
The way you relate as an adult to the opposite sex is influenced in part by your relationship with your opposite-sex parent. And that relationship is affected to some degree by your parent’s birth order.
The oldest brother of brothers, for example, may have more conflict with a mother who is the oldest sister of sisters than he would with a mother who was the youngest sister of brothers. The conflict in his relationship with his mother may make it even more difficult for him to relate well to other women in his life.
Your opposite-sex parent’s birth order has the most influence on you when your siblings are the same sex as you. In this situation, your parent is the chief clue you have about relating to the opposite sex. The quality of your relationship is likely to be repeated in your other relationships with the opposite sex. For example, if you have no brothers and your father is the youngest of four brothers, you may grow up seeing men as slightly childish, playful, and maybe irresponsible, with little understanding of women. This perception is likely to affect your approach to other males in your life. If, however, you have an older brother who is a high achiever and very responsible, this will color your picture of what men are like.
While your same-sex parent acts as a role model for how you behave as a male or a female, your opposite-sex parent has a greater influence on your self-image. Thus, a mother who is the youngest sister of a brother may be more admiring and supportive of her son and his maleness than an oldest-sister-of-sisters mother who has little understanding of men and little respect for “juniors.”
d. Your Children
As the above section indicates, your birth order can affect the kind of parent you are and the kind of relationship you have with each of your children, just as your child’s birth order will affect how he or she sees you.
If you are an oldest or a middle child, you probably either had some experience caring for younger children or witnessed it. Parenthood may come easily to you and be most fulfilling. You may be inclined to take too much responsibility for or be too controlling with your children; however, you may simply be a good and nurturing caretaker.
If you are an only child or a youngest child, you haven’t had the chance to do or observe any parenting other than what you received, and you may feel overwhelmed by the responsibility “of being a parent” and unsure about how to do it. On the other hand, you are likely to be less overpowering as a parent than an oldest and able, by default, to allow your children quite a bit of autonomy. If you are a youngest, you may enjoy playing with your children more than most parents do.
Helena and Gina were sisters. They grew up together in a small town in Vermont, went to the same schools, and had the same extended family around them. They both married local boys, and they both became single mothers of male only children due to losing their husbands in the war. But the similarities ended there. Helena was five years older than Gina. She had never been in trouble, had always been “responsible,” and had always done what was expected of her. Young Gina was the “rebel” and rarely did what she was supposed to do. As a result, Helena and Gina became very different kinds of parents to their sons. After her husband’s death, Helena never married again or even dated other men. She took her parenting duties very seriously and was highly protective of her son Jeff. She did everything she thought a good parent should do. She stayed in their large family home for Jeff’s sake. She always took him to Sunday School. She did everything for him at home, and when he had a problem out in the world she stepped in to make sure it was dealt with correctly. He lived with many rules and was kept close to home and to his mother for all his growing up years. He had very little private life.
As an adult, Jeff dated quite a bit, but he “never found the right woman.” Any of his more serious relationships tended to be with women much older than himself. He did not develop a career direction of his own and went from job to job, with long periods of not working in between. At the age of 40 he was still living at home with Helena.
Gina dearly loved her son Adam, but did little “for him” other than providing a fairly stable home life. Like her older sister she also worked full time while her son was growing up. After her husband’s death, Gina started dating again and remarried once while Adam was young but got divorced after six months. She decided that she liked dating more than she liked marriage.
She and Adam moved often from apartment to apartment and lived together almost like roommates. While she did exercise some discipline and control over him in his earlier years, by the time he was in seventh grade, they each had their own lives and came and went almost as they pleased. During his adolescence, they barely saw each other. She never asked him about his day or what he was doing. There was a lot of potential for him to get into trouble, but he never did. He was a happy, even-tempered, “good kid.” He got married after finishing college and moved to Boston to begin a career in advertising.
One Christmas, when the two cousins were in their forties, it was decided to have a small family reunion at Helena and Jeff’s home. Adam and his wife and two children and Gina timed their flights from two different cities so they could all be met at the airport by Jeff. On the drive to the house, they went by a bar, which Jeff pointed out, saying “That’s where I went when I was first allowed to stay out after midnight.” Adam asked his cousin how old he was when this happened. Jeff said, “Nineteen.” Turning to his mother in the back seat, Adam said, “You know, I don’t ever remember you telling me a time I had to be home by.” Gina said, “That’s right. I didn’t have to. You were always home before me.”
Helena’s parenting style was typical of oldest siblings who tend to take more responsibility and be more involved with their children. Gina’s style was a more extreme example of how youngests may opt out of the traditional parenting role. As you can see from the results, the birth-order inspired parenting style is not a predictor of how the child will turn out.
In addition to parenting characteristics related to your particular birth order, you may react to one or more of your children out of old patterns of behavior developed in relation to your own siblings. You may favor the child who shares your sex and birth order position, having sympathy and understanding for his or her familiar struggles. Or you may have conflict over the roles if, for example, you are an oldest and you and your oldest child struggle over who is in charge of the younger children. Of course, as an adult, you are in a better position to modify your behavior with your children than you were as a child with your siblings or parents.
Your relationship with a favored sibling while you are growing up may also affect your relationship with your child who is the same birth order and sex as that sibling. You may enjoy that child most as a companion while having the same kind of disagreements you had with your sibling.
Be aware, too, of how a child of yours might remind you of a sibling. Take note of your responses to certain behaviors. Otherwise
