In the "If personal ads were true" thread there's a lot of mention about being an only child, and hence needing space. I, too, am an only child. Personally, I find that it manifests by the ability to very easily relate to the young or the old; if we are not on the same 'level,' then I am well-versed in how to deal with you. I was the child growing up where parents of other kids would say, "If Dcc is going, then you can go," because parents viewed me as likable and responsible. In that same vein, I'm good at being the older one, the boss, the person in charge. Now - throw me in a room with a bunch of people, a task to do and no discernible leader and the power vacuum will drive me nuts. I also like to be alone. I live in a city where I have no relatives. I live alone with two dogs. As I've probably posted about to exhaustion, I've had no long-term relationships to speak of. This probably has something to do with preferring my own company and going a bit nuts if I'm forced to be around other people all the time. FOCUS: Where do you fit in the birth order? Do you think it matters? How has it affected your life?
I am the oldest, and have one younger brother, who is younger than me by 18 months. I am also the oldest of six cousins. Birth order has probably mattered for me, as I have been the token "adult" of my generation in my family since I was about 10. As in typical dysfunctional families, when the parents and their marriage are out of whack, everyone retreats to a small set of roles and behaviors that allow them to cope with the situation. Me, I was the responsible and mature one. My brother, being younger, acted out. He's since mellowed out quite a bit and I've become somewhat less high-strung. I now do the mature and responsible thing more by choice than as a coping mechanism. As the oldest, I had a completely different set of standards applied to me by my parents than my brother did, even though we had only a scant 18 months between us. I got no end of shit for staying out at a parent-supervised "party" (really just a bunch of nerds over at somebody's house) when I was 18 until something ridiculous like 1:30 or 2AM. Meanwhile, at the exact same time my brother was going down to Mexico once or twice a week and getting in whenever he felt like it, and my parents were willfully oblivious. Maybe they thought parenting might actually be effective with me? Who knows? I have also been told by all my aunts and uncles that I am in their living trusts or whatever as their health-care decisionmaker in case something bad happens to them. I'm OK with this, except that I'm in there before their own siblings and children. That means that if they go into a coma or whatever, I get to make the call over whether they should pull the plug or whatever instead of their adult children. Yeah, being responsible is awesome.
Im the middle child of three brothers. Booyah. Honestly, there were not any huge differences in how my parents treated us. We were pretty laid back kids. I know my older brother bitched after my dad had bought me my first dirt bike while making him pay for his own. My dad eventually made it up to him by paying for one. I was babied in general because I was afflicted with a birth defect, born without a lower esophageal sphincter. I had came close to dying as an infant, I could not keep food down, and it was extremely stressful for my parents. But I wasn't given preferential treatment over my brothers. My grand dad wasn't as equal in treating us the same. My older brother from a young age had always been interested in mechanics and how technical stuff worked. My grandpa loved this and fostered his interest in many ways. Taking him to ham radio conventions, teaching him to repair tvs (he owned a TV repair shop), work on engines, and let him have free reign over the farming equipment at a very young age. I never showed the same skill in picking up these things so he'd push my off to my grandma who'd sit me in front of TV. I begged him once to take me to one of the "hamfest," with my brother. All I got was a head shake and the reply "maybe next year..." I remember feeling like shit after that one. The biggest event happened while they were in Florida on vacation. We had to go up to their farm and cut the grass every few weeks. Not seeing a dislogged garden barrier in tall grass I ran over it with a Cub Cadet. In a fucking million to one shot it blasted out of the side through a cellar door window and busted their clothes dryer. Purely a freak accident, but he never trusted me around that shit ever again. To this day he barely lets me help him with the tractors even though his age has made him practically immobile. Nothing real earth shattering though really just minor white people problems Ill be telling a shrink some day.
I'm the middle child among 3. I think the popular wisdom is that the middle child is the most likely to be outlandish in some way or something like that? I think I once read something saying middle children are most likely to do drugs and join cults and shit. If so, then it definitely applies to me; in my family I'm definitely the oddball (though the verdict remains to be seen on my 13 year old sister). In a family of Muslims, I'm the only atheist. In an extended family of mostly doctors and engineers, I'm the only economist. I also am the only one in my family who smokes, does drugs, has sex (everyone knows parents don't have sex), or even drinks for that matter. In some ways I'm the black sheep but I'm also on track to be the most successful(in terms of education). I'm also one of the few to leave home; my older sister is 25 and still lives at home. Doesn't seem all that outlandish but take int account that my family is Pakistani, and suddenly it is pretty out there. I guess it has affected my life since my older sister is pretty much every sub-continental family's dream. If my parents knew everything(anything) I've done, I would be their nightmare. Luckily, as long as I'm in school, they're happy. I'm excited to see what happens when I inevitably bring home a non-pakistani girl home and tell my parents I plan on marrying her.
I'm an only child, which seems to be a rare thing around here because I'm the only one I know. I don't know if I'm better off that way or not, but siblings, at least to me, sure are a curious bunch: there's nothing like watching two brothers who would defend each other to the death in a bar fight behave in ways, like, taking the safety cage off rotary fan and throwing it at the other while it's still plugged in.
I am the oldest of three and I am 3.5 years older than my sister and 5.5 years older than my brother. Since the small age gap, they are much closer with each other than I with them. Not that we dont get along, its that they have gone through every stage of life together and had more to discuss that with me. When I was in high school they were in elementary, while they are in college, Im already out and working. As far as birth order goes, I got a lot of great stuff first and they got most of the hand-me-downs. On the flip side, I also got the corporal punishment from our very strict father, and they never did. My parents treated us pretty evenly as best they could. My brother and I went to public school while my sister went to a private school for kids with learning disabilities. Im not resentful of her going to a much better school, after all, Im not learning disabled. It all really changed when my sister got sick with Hodgkins Lymphoma two years ago. My parents attention has been largely focused on her and nearly her alone. She has been cancer free for about a year and a half (she had 6 months chemo) and my mom still treats her like shes going to die tomorrow. Once again, Im not resentful because I didnt have to go through cancer. My brother and I arent really affected by them paying less attention to us and much more to her, we both are very independent and liked doing our own thing anyway. My parents although protective in some instances and fairly strict Catholics, basically always let us do pretty much whatever we wanted growing up within reasonable boundaries. That never gave us cause to rebel and therefore never gave them cause to set unreasonable rules.
I'm the older of two. My brother is two years younger than I am. Does it matter? Maybe a little bit. I know my mom has said she wishes she had spread us out a little bit more. I became a little more independent at an earlier age because my mom was overwhelmed by having a baby and 2 year old. I was often handed off to my mentally-ill grandmother who stayed with us. God knows what her "looking after" was like. I'm assuming she stared into her Bible as I entertained myself. I grew up resenting my brother because he got most of the attention. Also, whenever I wanted to go outside and play he was usually napping or eating, or just being a baby. "Mom, can I go outside?" "No. M's sleeping." And, my little brain would think something similar to, "Screw M! I want to play!" I think in terms of affecting my life, I'm a little bit bossy sometimes. I started bossing my little brother around when we were younger just because he'd jump off a bridge if I told him to. Now, I take charge in my lab groups. But, I'd like to think that's because my lab partners are incredibly slow and if left to them it'd take 5 hours to do a 3 hour lab OR do it completely wrong. If I didn't step in I seriously think they would stare at each other with deer-in-the-headlights faces for a solid 10 minutes.
I'm the oldest of my immediate family, but I have three cousins who were born in the same year as me, but I'm the youngest of the four of us. I suffer from what I'm told is "First Pancake Syndrome" Every mistake that a new parent can make was made with me. Every psychological experiment to do with parenting was done on me. I was the tester baby. On the other hand, my parents raised me with the most energy. Unlike my little brother (who is about 15 years younger than me) my parents weren't burned out yet. I got bedtime stories every night, had to eat everything on my plate (which made me open to trying any food once, unlike my brothers who refuse to eat anything new), and I learned how to survive in the wilderness from all the hikes my father took me on. The only downside to being the youngest of my cousins is that every decision I make is assumed to be directly related to one of them. My wanting to go to public school rather than catholic school was attributed to one cousin. One of my first crushes looked kind of like one cousin's boyfriend, so everyone assumed I was going to follow her lead with every crush I ever got. Even when I have an anxiety attack, everyone assumes it's because I don't have my one cousin's life. (She is the same age as me, but has a job and a boyfriend and a house. What they don't realize is that she's reliving high school. She's had the same friends since she was in elementary school. Her boyfriend that she lives with is a guy she met in high school. She even works at the high school we graduated from, coaching the cheer-leading team she was captain of in high school. She has not grown as a person since she was 18.)
I'm the youngest of 2 brothers and a sister by 10 years and it has definitely made a difference. It meant I was always a lot more comfortable talking to adults and older people than I was hanging around with kids my own age. But it also meant I saw kids my own age as incredibly immature and thought myself as superior to them, even though I wasn't. The good parts of being the youngest by a wide margin? Getting spoiled by my parents because the others have grown up and don't really care about christmas etc as much. Getting away with murder compared to my brothers as my parents mellowed out a lot over time. Being 12-16 and being able to go round to my siblings places and drink with them and always know that they have got my back when it counts. The bad? It's almost like having another set of parents sometimes. For the most part they will always see me as the baby brother and will judge me accordingly no matter what I achieve. I know it can't be helped but it is damn annoying at times. Especially when Adam (the middle child) has his yearly 'tell Lyle exactly what a failure I think he is' night, this year he told me that he no longer sees me as a human being, let alone family. Which is harsh in its self but I have done nothing to deserve that and have been trying to figure out what caused him to turn into an absolute prick. At least it meant we haven't said a word to each other in over 6 months so I've had a bit of peace and quiet. Fuckin' families.
Oh, I forgot to add - although I'm the oldest, there are five of us born the same year. We're also the 'oldest' of the cousins, so I suppose I did get a smaller dose of what it would be like to have siblings. The result is that I can tolerate it in the very short term, but (especially as a child) I'd eventually back off and go and sit with the adults.
I'm older than both my siblings - I have two years on my brother and five years on my sister (almost exactly as our birthdays are all in a two week span, actually - which made it really uncomfortable when I realized how that happens) I was very much the trial run. Rules were far harsher, and I was allowed to do far less than my younger siblings at the same age. Also when I got older if I was given something I'd "earned with age" or similar, like an allowance or anything like that, they'd get it at the same time without having to wait the two/five years, despite my parents trying to sell it as an 'earned with age' type thing. This is really trivial in the grand scheme of things but it's always bothered me more than it probably should.
Only child, dead center age wise in my cousins, with a high variance of age, basically there's 2 cousins my age, and the other 40 or so are at least 5 years older or 5 years younger. When I was young family parties were all about booze, but they wouldn't let us drink till we were at least 18. When I was finally old enough to drink they had all settled down and family parties mainly consisted of me getting hammered around a bunch of toddlers and openly mocked by aunts and uncles, stupid relatives.
I was about the 101,156,186,280th person born. It only matters to me and about 11 other people. There were a lot fewer dinosaurs around, but other ways it's affected me are difficult to quantify.
I am the middle of three. I don't think it manifests all that much for me. For one, my older brother isn't the archetypal oldest - he stutters extremely badly and is pretty much a shut-in. Notwithstanding us fighting a lot. Mind you, as the oldest he was always the one to get new stuff and I would get he hand me downs, and since my sister was the baby and a girl she'd get new stuff. I also often got the sense that my sister got better treatment in general - if she cried hard enough in the mornings she'd get to stay home from school but my parents would rarely let me stay home even if I felt sick. I sometimes exhibit the bEhaviour of being irritated if people arn't playing nice in the sandbox, especially so when I'm home and my sister's acting like a spoiled bitch, as she often does.
Youngest of four boys. The eldest two are 36 and 30 and the next one will be 25 this month, and I'm 23. One of the only things I notice about this situation nowadays are I'm more into sports than basically everyone I know, and know far less children movies/stories than everyone else I know, since I had to pretty much do what the older guys were doing. We all get along really well, and the age gap has basically become a non factor now that we're all adults, other than the eldest have kids.
I'm the oldest of 5 (2 brothers and 2 sisters) and my youngest sister is 14 years younger than me. Having two brothers roughly the same size as me, I've definitely developed food aggression issues. Being on a budget, my parents could only afford to make so much food every meal, so if we wanted to get seconds and go to bed full, we had to eat fast. That trait still holds true today with my brothers and I. I snarl at my wife whenever she asks for a bite of my food and I don't talk while I'm eating. There's no time. Our meal prayer was "Father, Son, Holy Ghost, who eats the fastest eats the most"
I'm an only child, my mother is an only child and her father is an only child. Needless to say, I wasn't around many cousins growing up. The one that is closest to my age lives in Massachusetts and her mother is my mom's second cousin, and they don't get along. I think I'm your typical only child. The one stereotype of only children I can't stand is that we're all spoiled. No, our parents just didn't have to devote their attention to anyone else. I don't consider myself spoiled because I didn't get everything I wanted when I was growing up. I never had to share anything, so when I went away to college, it was quite an adjustment. I definitely need my alone time and I am very independent. If I don't have time alone, I tend to get very bitchy. If I need to work with a group of people, I'll usually let everyone else figure it out and delegate, rather than taking charge. The major thing that sucked growing up without any siblings is that my parents were extremely overprotective. I wasn't the cool kid because I was never allowed out past 11 pm until I was like, 19. I always wished I had an older brother that was a fuck up.
I'm the 3rd of four boys. Two older brothers are 35 and 33, I'm 27 (28 in about two weeks), and younger brother is 25. While I am the 3rd, I've always felt like the middle child, because by the time I was 10, my oldest brother was rarely home. He met a girl from another town, and the day he turned 18 he started staying the night at her house 6 nights a week. There were 6 of us in a 3 bedroom house, and my dad made a make-shift 4th bedroom out of the laundry room where my oldest brother slept (it was tiny, but furthest away from the rest of the family and the best bedroom in the house). I was still sharing with my little brother, even though I was 14 by this time. My parents informed my oldest brother that they wanted him to either come home at night and use his bed, or move out totally and let me use his bed. They tried to tell him that it was silly that I was still sharing a room while a perfectly good room and bed was going unused 6 nights a week. They never knew when he'd be home or for how long, and they just wanted him to either use the room they had for him or let me use it. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. My oldest brother took this as "you've never loved me and now you're kicking me out." As a result, we rarely see him to this day. I am very close with my other brothers, but unfortunately he moved pretty far away and only rarely comes to visit. As for myself, my oldest brother moving out like that actually affected me a lot, as I quickly became the middle child. My next older brother could do absolutely no wrong. He was the golden child every parent dreams of. He was extremely popular with everyone, excelled at absolutely everything he did (band, wrestling, cross country, track, soccer, was in all advanced classes and had a high GPA, and also worked at McDonalds and was considered the best employee/manager in the area). For the entirely of my high school life, I was never known by my actual name, but instead as "X's brother." I resented him like crazy. Below me, my little brother got away with murder. My freshman year of college I came home with four As and a B for the semester. I made the Dean's list in my first semester. My younger brother, still a sophomore in high school, received 3 Cs and 2 Ds on his report card. My dad asked me why the fuck I didn't get straight A's, and proceeded to praise my little brother for not failing anything and helped him buy a fucking Camaro (I was driving a '94 Chevy Cavalier with a giant scrape/dent along the side). It was from that point on that I became an exceptionally angry person with my brothers. My little brother could do no wrong no matter how bad he fucked up, and my older brother could do no wrong because he literally could do nothing wrong. Finally, I went away to college (see my story in the "getting canned" thread). I was the only one of my brothers to actually go away to college. The rest either lived at home and went to a commuter campus or didn't go to college at all. Spending 2 years away at school and 4 years working gave me some perspective about my family, and as a result, I mellowed out quite a bit. Since then, I have grown really close with two of my brothers (the younger and next older one). We get together regularly to just hang out, watch football, play poker, or just get dinner. The resentment from my teenage years is long gone, as it was silly and pointless. The only way it really affects me now is that I still don't have a very good relationship with my oldest brother. He lives kind of far away, and only comes to visit once every couple of months. We'd like to see him more often, and get to know my niece and nephew a bit more, but not only does he still live kind of far away, he still harbors some resentment because he feels like my parents kicked him out.
I'm the second youngest of six kids. I'm not going to bore you with the details, as I basically fill the "middle child" stereotype and my siblings on the extremes fulfill those stereotypes as well. The only real interesting part is that out of six, I was the only one that was on purpose (yes, I do use that as a trump card in arguments) and after my brother my father gave up and got a vasectomy (during which, terribly enough, the numbing agent apparently didn't work and he actually FELT HIMSELF GETTING STERILIZED). The wife and I have already agreed though -- after two kids, I'm getting the old snip snip. Except I'll be taking some extra pain medication beforehand, just in case.