Birth Order

Everyone takes it personally when it comes to birth order.

Children and parents alike are profoundly affected by the constellations of siblings.. But that doesn’t mean the effects of birth order are as clear or straightforward as we sometimes make them sound. Indeed, birth order can be used to explain every trait and its precise opposite. I’m competitive, driven — typical oldest child! My brother, two years younger, is even more competitive, more driven — typical second child, always trying to catch up!

“Too many parents are haunted by experiences both good and bad that they identify with their birth order,” said Dr. Peter A. Gorski, a professor of pediatrics, public health and psychiatry at the University of South Florida. And that might lead them to classify their own children according to birth order, he went on, which in turn can lead to a sense of identification or even rejection and to “self-fulfilling prophecies.”

“Birth order doesn’t cause anything,” (says) Frank J. Sulloway, a visiting scholar at theUniversity of California Berkeley Dr. Sulloway said. “It’s simply a proxy for the actual mechanisms that go on in family dynamics that shape character and personality.”

Now, of course birth order played into my patients’ patterns, but so did gender and birth spacing and, above all, temperament.

"I wouldn’t discount the impact of birth order,” Dr. Gorski told me. “It sets up the structure of one’s place in relation to others from the beginning, as we learn how to react to people of different ages and different relationships.”

Perri Klass
New York Times

Parenting Advice

The billion-dollar industry of quote-unquote educational toys that are supposed to make your baby smarter is a boondoggle. There's no evidence that any of those things make a difference. Children are learning the way that other people's minds work, which is much more important to learn than even letters and numbers. I'm afraid the parenting advice to come out of developmental psychology is very boring: pay attention to your kids and love them.

Alison Gopnik in an interview with TIME magazine about her book The Philosophical Baby

Brain Scans & Personality

Physical differences in our brains indicate our personality type. That’s the finding of a study of brain scans by scientists at England’s University of Hull, Italy’s University of Parma and Washington University in St Louis. They say variations in the size of specific regions of the brain that appear to be linked with certain tendencies that have been a part of us since birth. The differences could explain why person grows up diligent and introspective while another is outgoing and impulsive.

The researches say the study suggests four personality types.

People with smaller amounts of tissue in the brain above the eye sockets (known as the orbito-frontal) had harm-avoidance personalities. They were more pessimist, shy and tended to find comfort in outside sources such as food or drugs.

Novelty seekers were more impulsive and were structurally bigger in the same area.

Reward-dependence personalities had smaller amounts of tissue in the fronto-striatal and limbic areas of the brain. These are more an addictive personalities.

And those labeled Persistence tended to be industrious, hard-working and perfectionist.

The scientists say the differences support the concept that different children will learn in different ways. An approach tailored to the personality of the individual could make all the difference as to whether they are able to grasp the lesson.

Details of the study will be published in the Brain Research Bulletin.