"Act Your Birth Order"

I'm writing this blog to serve as a collection of images and articles surrounding birth order and their relevance to my paper.

I found this cartoon on an archive of New Yorker cartoons called "Cartoon Bank." It depicts a mother scolding her son saying, "Act your birth order!" Although the expression is "Act your age!", the expression the mother is using is scientifically more accurate. Both a first born and a youngest child at age 12 have completely different levels of maturity.

Frank Sulloway, a visiting professor of psychology at both M.I.T and UC Berkeley, writes, "within-family studies, firstborns generally score higher in most aspects of conscientiousness. Firstborns are rated by both parents and siblings as being more self-disciplined, organized, and deliberate than their younger brothers and sisters... For example, firstborns often occupy the role of a surrogate parent, a family niche that tends to ingratiate them with parents as the “responsible” child. Owing to their relative immaturity, laterborns are generally unsuited for the role of a surrogate parent and must seek parental favor by other means—for instance, through athletic ability or by developing other latent abilities... or humor as a strategy, to cultivate the role of the family comedian" (Sulloway 170).