Is middle child syndrome real? Dr. Ray looks at the research on birth order, explains why he thinks temperament matters far more, and walks through how his own kids kept moving in and out of the middle.
“Middle child syndrome”
National Middle Child Day, and we’ve got national days for everything, honors the in-between child in the family. It says larger families celebrate more than one middle child, too. I think that blows the whole theory of middle child syndrome out of the water. Many believe that birth order plays a pivotal role in the personalities of children. The first born is the leader, the youngest is the baby of the family, and therefore the middle child is kind of the lost child, in between. Well, if you look at the research, it doesn’t really support this nice little theory.
Parents will say to me, “Oh, Dr. Ray, in my family that is the way it is. My middle child is the one who struggles the most, seeks the most attention, has the most self-image problems, doesn’t know where he fits in the family structure.” I think the explanation is more temperament. It’s the way he is wired innately. He would be that way if he were the oldest. “But Dr. Ray, isn’t that middle child syndrome?” Well, think about it. He has a one-in-three chance of being like that by temperament in that middle position, and one in three is plenty to keep the stereotype alive. They’d be that way if they were second oldest or fifth youngest. It doesn’t matter.
“Don’t have an odd number of kids”
I think middle child syndrome has gained momentum as families have gotten smaller. If you have three kids, that child was in the middle from when the baby was born, so let’s say he was four when the baby was born and his older sister was six. He had 10, 12, 15 years of being the middle child, so you could say that locks him into the middle child persona. Two children in a family is now much more the norm. So tell parents, if you’re worried about middle child syndrome, don’t have an odd number of kids. With four you can have an upper middle and a lower middle, but you really can’t have a middle.
My guess was about 20 percent. It’s 15 percent: 15 percent of American families have three kids, just three. I wasn’t too far off. With five, it’s approximately 5 percent. So you have a middle child for years if you don’t have a big family.
When we had three children, my daughter Hannah was the middle child. She didn’t stay middle child very long, maybe a year, year and a half. We adopted Sam, and Hannah moved up to upper middle. Then we adopted the twins a couple of years later, and Hannah was definitely second oldest of six. The twins shared the middle position, because there were six kids and they were three and four. But they were twins, so maybe they shared more middle than the typical middle. Then we got Pete, number seven, and I think that moved Sammy into the middle child position, number four: seven, six, five, Sammy four, middle, three, two, one. Then we went to eight and nine, James and Mary. Now Hannah is definitely the oldest next to Andrew, so she’s long since abandoned middle child. Did she have any residual middle child syndrome? Is there a chronic middle child syndrome left over from when she was middle child for about a year? Did she absorb the persona, or did she just shoot through the whole position? You see how complex it gets?
Temperament beats birth order
It really is a nice little cutesy theory, but it does not have much in the way of research support. The only place birth order seems to show anything is the oldest and the only group, a little more independent, a little more achieving, maybe as a group. And these are not automatic findings. We like to latch on to things that sound cutesy. Personality is very complex and very diverse.
It’s fun, but here’s, I think, a little bit of the danger in it. It can predispose you to look for things that may not really be there, or may not be there in that intensity. “He’s got self-image problems. What do you expect? He’s a middle child.” “She acts up an awful lot, but that’s what I heard about middle children.” And you’re looking for the wrong explanation. Maybe she acts up because you’re not disciplining her well enough, because her temperament is a little more pushy. The oldest wasn’t that pushy. She is. Probably it’s the dynamic between the way you handle her and her temperament. Temperament is so much more powerful than birth order. Any parent of more than one kid knows how very different their personalities can be. And some of the most difficult kids fall in the middle: about a third of them if you have three kids, 20 percent if you have five, roughly 14 percent if you have seven, 11 percent if you have nine. They keep shifting around.
I like where they say big families can have a number of middle children. We had four or five middle kids, but they didn’t stay there very long. They moved on or up. Fortunately, none of them moved down. Their personalities were shaped much more powerfully by how they were wired and by our parenting. So the middle child stuff is fun, but it really doesn’t have much impact. Let them have their National Middle Child Day.
Dr. Ray talks about what a big family teaches in Taught by Ten.
Transcript of Dr. Ray’s audio blog, lightly edited for reading.