Petter Kristensen, epidemiologist at the University of Oslo and lead author of the Science magazine study on birth order and IQ, and Frank J. Sulloway, visiting scholar to the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley who wrote an accompanying editorial, discuss the findings that firstborns have higher IQs than their younger siblings.
Comments [15]
From NYC’s district 2 school board discussions years ago on effective ways to teach and learn it was noted that the highest level of incorporating/learning knowledge is to teach it to someone else.
If the oldest are teaching sibs that might be part of where their advantage comes from.
This study was totally true in my case. My ivy educated brother is much more academically savvy than me, but at the same time more cautious, conventional, and generally tends to play it close to the vest.
I, on the other hand, am the token gay younger sister who plays rugby and lived in Europe for some months. I'm also more numb to parental criticism. I couldn't believe the New York Times called us out...
In my family this is certainly true. I have been tested and have been told i have above average IQ, even with mild learning disabliites, my mother, father, and and older brother performed better academically and career wise, Ivy-leagure colleges and better jobs as youngers ages. My cousins who are also first-borns are also hard working, smart people. I think it is a combination of factors, but this certainly explains why I ahve always felt like the "runt" of the family, even with a master's degree!
I think you might have a case for older children performing better at school, or thinking more logically than youngers, but of course, that doesn't mean they are "smarter" just smart in a more quantifiable way. In my own family, I am older, and it is apparent to me that my abilties, although not unconsiderable, were bolstered by constant contact with adults and more praise and individual attention in my formative years. My brother, who is younger, spent a lot more time with his peers, and more time engaged in phsyical pursuits. As a result at the end of our childhood, I was book smart, and he was definetely more socially and phsyically adept than me. As we have grown older, we have managed to transgress those boundries established by our habitual family interactions, and he found academic and professional success in an area of study I always sucked at, while I have found ways to be more socially and physically confident. So I doubt any actual disparity in intelligence or innate ability, and suspect it was always a function of our family dynamic.
Also, I think even that falls apart when you look at families with more than 4 or even 3 kids. There aren't many families like that around these days, but I suspect the older = "smarter" wouldn't hold true in those cases, because the family dynamics are going to be totally different and more constantly shifting.
Did the studies account for the fact that High IQ parents have less children (thus less younger siblings) skewing the results?
What about the middle child?
Is the effect similar at the tails of the bell curve?...higher IQ sibs and lower IQ sibs...my guess would be less so since there is regression toward the mean.
Perhaps the eggs of the first born are stronger and more viable and therefore are released sooner and as a consequence fertilized and become a newborn first resulting in higher IQ. This would be a biological explanation versus an environmental explanation.
Are only children like eldest children?
As the oldest of three, this study has confirmed what I have been telling my brother and sister for years.
As an eldest brother of all boys, this comes as no surprise. What I have noticed for most of my life that almost all of my best friends have been either eldest or only children. I have not sought these friends deliberately because of their birth order, but it is something I have noticed. Might not this natural magnetism reinforce high IQs with mutual intellectual challenges?
From my observations, it is certainly true that for the most part firstborns have higher IQs or, at least, perform better academically than their younger siblings. I went to an Ivy League college and most of the students there were firstborns or only childs. If they were not firstborns, then their older borther or sister went to a higher Ivy or Stanford/MIT..etc.
Of course there are always exceptions to the rule, but the overwhelming success of firstborns compared to their younger siblings supports the recent findings.
Are the siblings from the same mother and father (raised in the same 'home')? I wonder if the same results would hold true for step-families. Thank you
I haven't read the study, just read articles on it, so I just wonder how valid the results are. It just seems that there would be many factors that could affect this, including economics, personalities of everyone in the family, the childrens friends, other interests the children have (i.e. sports.)
Wouldn't you need to know more about the families to validate the results?
so what does iq mean? you can score on a test? I have triplet siblings (2 identical boys, one fraternal sister - the two boys (nos. 6 & 7 birth order) have genius iqs and the sister was learning disabled (dyslexia) - if you watch the movies of them playing as toddlers, she has them whipped at just about everything and they don't even know what she's up to!
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