The eldest daughter's guide to coping
Birth order doesn't determine personality ... and that's a good thing
If you’re an eldest daughter, you could be entitled to compensation. Eldest daughters have been through so much, we should be a protected class. At the very least, the eldest daughter is likely on an antidepressant medication of some kind.
If you’re an eldest daughter, you may have chosen a difficult, bossy, hard-charging, exacting, hall-monitoring profession:
There’s no need to ask who is going to bring cups to the picnic, who will pick up the decorations for the baby shower, or who has the airline confirmation number: The eldest daughter has already forwarded it to the entire family group text!
The “eldest daughter” meme is sometimes expanded to “eldest immigrant daughter,” and, on an emotional level, I can’t deny the accuracy.
As an eldest immigrant daughter, I have proofread my parents’ resumes. I have planned family vacations. I have learned to prepare the fragrant broths of my ancestors while eating grilled cheese like a good American—if I work hard enough I can manage everyone’s emotions! Naturally, I began babysitting and cooking for my family at an age when most American kids are apparently still riding in car seats.
I do sometimes think all of this early responsibility made me more conscientious, and possibly more neurotic, two of the Big Five personality traits. And perhaps the “immigrant” part—growing up around different cultural norms and values—did shape my personality somewhat.
But scientifically, there’s no evidence that being an eldest daughter—or the middle son, or the youngest—influences personality. In fact, birth order doesn’t seem to influence personality very much at all.
In 2015 two major personality researchers, Brent Roberts and Rodica Damian, conducted the largest study on birth order and personality to date. They looked at 377,000 American high-school students, and they controlled for socioeconomic status, the ages of the children, and the number of children in the family.1
They found that firstborns do tend to be more extroverted, agreeable, and conscientious than younger siblings, but the difference between the two groups was so small as to be negligible. The average difference was about one-25th of a standard deviation. “You’re not going to be able to sit two people down next to each other and see the differences between them,” Roberts said at the time. “It’s not noticeable by anybody.” Birth order is “not an important consideration” for personality, they concluded.
People find this extremely hard to believe—I feel in my weary bones like an eldest daughter! It can be disconcerting when something that feels true turns out not to be supported by evidence; this was one of the most commented-on elements of my story on personality change. (“Learning styles” are another myth that people are not eager to part with.)
But there are a few reasons why the birth-order/personality connection could feel true without being true:
There’s a bit of a horoscope effect happening here: Depending on the day, you can see yourself as a classic responsible older child, a peacemaker middle child, or an impulsive youngest child, or possibly all three.
Families that have middle children, definitionally, have at least three children, and that means they are different from families that have just one or two children. Wealthier families tend to have fewer kids, so that means more middle kids are born into poorer families. Because of that, birth-order effects could really just be socioeconomic effects in disguise. (Roberts and Damian controlled for socioeconomic status, which might be why they got the results they did.)
You could focus less on the eldest part and more on the daughter part. Women do have slightly different personalities than men, on average: We tend to be slightly more neurotic and more agreeable, for instance. You might indeed be more anxious than your male siblings, but it’s because you’re female, not because you’re the eldest.
Next time you see a family where the oldest child is acting like a stereotypical first-born, and the youngest is acting like a stereotypical last-born, consider what you’re really seeing: A biologically older child behaving older and more responsibly, and a biologically younger child behaving younger and less obediently. But these are age differences, not birth-order effects.
Null-ish findings like these can be frustrating, because your family of origin can feel like such a fitting explanation for why you are the way you are.
But in some ways, it's also freeing. If you believe in personality change, like I do, it’s nice to know that you’re not trapped being the stereotypical “eldest daughter.” You can let someone else make the hotel reservation for a change. You don’t have to perfectly manage every situation you find yourself in as an adult. In the wise words of my former therapist, “let other people be uncomfortable.” It’s what a youngest child would do.
Further reading: Great Myths of Personality, by Brent Donnellan and Richard Lucas.
There was an NBER paper that came out recently that suggested slightly larger birth-order effects on personality, but in an interview, Donnellan and Lucas told me it didn’t shift their view of birth-order effects being small. If you would like a nitty-gritty methodological breakdown as to why, perhaps my arm can be twisted into doing another post.