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This book will help you answer, in part, the question “Why am I like this?” The summary of research findings about birth order positions in a family should help you recognize aspects of your own personality and understand their origin.

While it may be comforting to find out that some of your less desirable characteristics were almost inevitable given your sex and birth order, it isn’t helpful to blame your faults on that and give up trying to change. The point of knowing how those characteristics developed is to learn strategies for changing the ones you don’t like. Just because you were born as a youngest or an oldest or an only, you do not have to keep on behaving like one; the traits are not written in stone.

Many of the descriptions in this book are not very flattering. It almost seems that there is no “good” birth order. Each of the birth order positions has characteristics that are helpful and make life easier for the person, and each presents challenges to face.

These descriptions of the birth order positions for each sex report what most people in these positions are usually like according to research studies; they do not say what anyone should be like. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. They simply provide one more framework for looking at yourself and your relationships. (See the appendix for more details on the research.) The most valuable and extensive research has been done by Austrian psychologist Walter Toman, whose book Family Constellation: Its Effect on Personality and Social Behavior (Springer, 1976) is a classic in the field and is highly recommended for your further reading.

For many reasons, some of which are discussed in chapter 15, the description of your birth order may not fit you at all. It may seem about as meaningful as a horoscope reading or a fortune cookie. If this is your experience, first ask someone who knows you well to read the description of your birth order position and see if it fits. We are not always the best judges of our own character. If your outside reader agrees that the description does not fit, you may be interested in finding out why this is so. What aspects of your family situation have affected the development of the usual birth order characteristics?