Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
Sure they exist, but we don&#x27;t want to talk about it.  There is a strong motivation to be able to say that everyone is created equal, regardless of how uncontrollable factors affect you (birth order, height, race, gender).  We don&#x27;t want to kill someone&#x27;s motivation to study for college just because they are a third child.  But stereotypes exist for a reason.  The hard part is separating hatred-based stereotypes from the stereotypes based on observations throughout history.<p>Regarding birth order, the &quot;middle child&quot; stereotype is prevalent in Western society.  Did the middle child stereotype spring from some sort of effort by first-borns to keep their lower-ranked siblings in line (a la racism?)?  I doubt it.  The middle child stereotype probably came from hundreds of years of observations.  It&#x27;s a similar story for the first-born and last-born stereotypes- they weren&#x27;t created out of any prejudice, but probably from hundreds of years of mothers chatting about their kids.<p>Like the article says, denying that the differences exist prevents us from ever finding out why (because people won&#x27;t do research on something that doesn&#x27;t exist).  So let&#x27;s acknowledge that some groups of people are different than other groups, and then respectfully do research to figure out why.  The differences could be societal- perhaps first-borns are treated with more care by their parents, or they could be biological- perhaps the hormonal changes in a pregnant woman are different for each successive child, or they could be something else entirely- I had many of the same teachers as my older sister, and I often benefited from them having a pleasant experience with her, making my time in class much easier.<p>But anyway, the first step is acknowleding that a difference exists, and that you aren&#x27;t somehow &quot;birth order-ist&quot; just because you acknowledge that first-born kids often outscore lower order kids on many metrics.