Читать книгу Birth Order & You - Dr. Ronald W. Richardson & Lois A. Richardson - Страница 26

From ancient times, the oldest child has had a special significance in the family — and in the world. This special significance has meant everything from inheriting the kingdom to being offered as a sacrifice in religious rites, which is a good metaphor for the mixed blessings of the oldest.

The oldest child — the first child — is like a first love. The relationship between the first child and parents can never be duplicated. It is replete with the awe and wonder of having brought into the world this little being, the focus of the parents’ dreams and hopes. Even if later children become more favored by the parents, the relationship is usually not as intense as with the first child.

For the first few years, oldest children receive the full, undiluted force of their parents’ love, fears, and expectations. The parents are usually very excited about the birth of the first child (unless it came too early in the marriage or was the cause of a “shot-gun wedding”) and look forward to it with eager anticipation mingled with fear.

Even before the birth, the first pregnancy elicits more excitement and more anxiety than later pregnancies. Prospective first parents usually worry at a minimum about the health of the mother and fetus, what to expect during delivery, whether the baby will be whole and normal at birth. And these concerns are not unfounded. The first is usually the most difficult labor, averaging 14 hours compared to 8 hours for later births, and there are more difficulties with delivery and more abnormalities in newborn firsts.

After the birth, the new parents worry about what kind of parents they will be and whether their child will develop normally.

The parents pay close attention to everything that happens with the first baby — the first smile, the first word, the first step are all exclaimed over, celebrated, and recorded in the baby book. Everything is special and wondrous. This feeling about the oldest child’s accomplishments can go on for life, through first graduations, marriage, birth of grandchildren, and so on. Later-born children are taken for granted more, and each successive child usually receives less attention and praise for these routine accomplishments.

Parents are more likely to see their first child as a reflection of themselves so they push the oldest to excel. Oldests usually do walk and talk earlier and are toilet trained sooner than later children in the family.

An oldest boy often has the additional burden of being his father’s alter ego even to the point of being given the same name and being expected to follow in father’s footsteps whether his feet fit them or not.

But the first child is also the grand experiment. The parents don’t really know what they’re doing. As one playwright said, “Children ought to be like waffles; you throw away the first one.” The parents want desperately to do well with the first one, but their lack of experience makes them more anxious and tense about their parenting, and this is communicated to the child. The parents are often overprotective and too indulgent with their first, while at the same time they have high expectations and often punish the child for not living up to their demands.

Even if the effects are mixed, oldest children have the benefit of the exclusive attention of their parents for several years. Then, just when they have become accustomed to their privileged position with their parents, they are displaced by a new baby. When this displacement comes between the age of 18 months and 4 or 5 years, it is an extreme shock to the oldest child. After 5 years, the oldest has a place in the world outside the family and a well-established identity, so is less threatened by the newcomer.

For the first child who is under 5 years old, the birth of a second child changes everything. Parents suddenly become less available and apparently less interested in the oldest child. Their attention and energy focus on the new little thing in the crib. The behavior of the oldest starts being judged more harshly, and the parents’ love seems to become more conditional.

The oldest who does fairly well with this transition has usually found a way to connect better with dad at this point. This is, of course, dependent on dad being physically and emotionally available. If, in the process of “losing” mom to the newborn, the oldest can get more time and attention from dad, then the arrival of a new sibling is not a total loss. If this happens when the oldest is becoming aware of and more oriented to the world outside the home (usually dad’s domain in our society), the shift can fit nicely with the child’s own developmental needs and interests.

Oldests are often confused following the birth of a sibling. They don’t understand what is happening to their world. They feel abandoned at first, then jealous. What they thought was theirs is no longer theirs in the same way. No matter how well the parents have prepared them for the baby, they usually don’t see any need for more children in the family, especially helpless, feeble ones who can’t even play with them. They wonder why their parents weren’t satisfied with them. Why do their parents need another one?

The usual reaction when the baby has been home for a few days is “Send that kid back where he came from.” And oldests don’t get over these feelings easily, even if the feelings go underground after a while. In their book Siblings Without Rivalry, authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish suggest imagining that a husband comes home one day and tells his wife that he’s going to be bringing home a new young wife to join their family — someone she can play with and is sure to love. When the younger woman arrives, he spends all his free time helping her get adjusted to her new home and playing with her. He gives her some of his first wife’s clothes and jewelry, and asks the first wife to look after her while he’s at work. How would this feel to you if you were the wife?

That husband may continually reassure his first wife that he still loves her, and he certainly wouldn’t ask her to leave, but most wives in western cultures would still have trouble accepting this situation. Yet parents expect their oldest child to be mature and understanding about it when they bring home a second child. The first child doesn’t want to give up any of the parents’ love and attention any more than the first wife does, and will do what is necessary to compete with the intruder.

At first the oldest may try to regain attention by reverting to baby-like behavior and demanding a bottle or asking to sleep in a crib. If that doesn’t work, the oldest may have temper tantrums or become hostile and aggressive, particularly toward the baby. Stories of the violent actions of oldest children against their next youngest sibling are legion — the stick poked in the eye, the push off the change table, the dropped baby. This, of course, makes the parents angry at the oldest and even more solicitous of the youngest.

...once I discovered my little sister sleeping peacefully in [my favorite] cradle. At this presumption on the part of one to whom as yet no tie of love bound me, I grew angry. I rushed upon the cradle and overturned it, and the baby might have been killed had my mother not caught her as she fell.

Helen Keller, Story of My Life

However, in most families this behavior doesn’t work either, so the oldest tries another way to get the parents’ attention. This leads to one of the common patterns of oldest children: they try very hard to be good (or perfect) so that their parents will continue to love them rather than their “replacement.” They become helpful with the baby in order to earn love. They may become like deputy parents. They give up trying to get what they want for themselves and do what the parents want. Their parents naturally appreciate the new cooperativeness of the oldest and reinforce it by telling the oldest that he or she is bigger and smarter than the newborn and therefore superior. Even though the newborn now gets most of the parents’ attention, the oldest gets their approval for being whatever they mean by “good” — quiet, tidy, responsible, helpful, nurturing, grown-up.

The parents expect the oldest to set a good example for younger siblings — to be a big girl or boy now — and to help take care of the baby. As a result, oldest children learn early that the way to get rewards is to do what their parents want — to be helpful and “grown-up.” They may begin to identify with the parents as a way of distinguishing themselves from the baby nuisance. This can include taking care of the parents. Oldest child George W. Bush, Jr.’s younger sister died when he was seven, and he was overheard saying to friends that he couldn’t come out to play because he had to play with his (grieving) mother.

The pattern may be accentuated as the oldest takes care of successive children in a continuing attempt to win the parents’ approval. This can result in an oldest child who resents the burden and feels as an adult that his or her life was sacrificed for the younger children. In any case, the oldest rarely has a chance to be a child very long before becoming a “parent,” unless the younger siblings are born many years after the oldest.

When the second child is a different sex, the negative reactions of the first child are not usually as dramatic; there is less direct sense of threat to the status of the oldest and less need to compete. If all the younger siblings are of the opposite sex, the characteristics just described will be moderated considerably. For example, an older brother of sisters is often warmer and more caring than an older brother of brothers.

When the second child is the same sex, however, the threat to the first seems much greater. If the younger ones are all of the same sex, especially if there are two or more, the oldest-child characteristics are usually intensified.

If there are more than five years between the oldest and the next child, the oldest — who has been an only child all that time — is more secure, more sure of his or her place in the world, and more likely to feel reasonably benign toward the newcomer. He or she may even enjoy the younger child.

I can taste even now the fresh delight of learning the boy’s open face, his early laughter, prevailing geniality and the immediate presence of a watchful mind, ready to learn every trick we [Reynolds and his parents] could teach and to thank us steadily with stunts of his own.

Reynolds Price, writing about his brother seven years younger in Clear Pictures: First Love, First Guides

Sometimes an oldest child is able to take advantage of the parents’ inexperience and become the power in the family, behaving imperiously and stubbornly with the parents and the younger children. This is most likely to happen where the parents are both youngests and uncomfortable with the experience of being in charge.

Occasionally, the oldest child will end up being a leader of the siblings against the parents. However, most oldests side with the parents against the unruly younger children, though they may go through a period of rebellion when they are teenagers.

The oldest in the family is often disciplined more than younger children. One reason for this is the parents’ anxiety and higher expectations. Another is that when other children come along, the added burdens make parents more impatient with the oldest and more likely to expect more from that child. Parents often unjustly blame the oldest when there are fights among the siblings because they think the oldest “should know better.” More than one youngest has reported “getting off easy” in the family because all the pressure went on the older children and the youngest slipped through without much friction.

Since oldest children spend more years in the exclusive presence of their parents, they spend more time observing and imitating their behavior. They are consequently the children most likely to be similar to their parents. If the parents are nurturing and warm, they will be like that; if the parents are aggressive and harsh, they will be like that. When their parents are old or dead, the oldest sibling is usually the one that takes on the parents’ role of organizing holiday get-togethers, or handling family crises, or running the family business.

Oldest children often end up as guardians of the status quo. They begin by defending their own position in the family against later children, go on to preserving the family traditions and morality for their younger siblings, and may end up trying to protect the status quo in the world. Oldest children have fond memories of the past when they were the only. They do not have good feelings about change. In reaction to that situation, they may become so rigid that they are unwilling to accept any change and unable to compromise.

The closer contact with their parents gives oldests better verbal skills and more exposure to abstract thinking than their younger siblings. As a result, oldests usually adapt better to the learning techniques of school. May Stewart studied 7,000 London school children and found that the older children in two-child families were generally better students than the younger children and stayed in school longer. This higher rate of school “success” was true even though overall there was no difference in IQ between the oldest child and youngest child in the families.

Oldests usually have more privileges than the younger siblings, but also are expected to and do assume more and more responsibility as they grow up. An oldest girl usually has the same responsibilities as an oldest boy — sometimes even more — but not the same privileges.

As adults, oldest children usually have many parental qualities; they can be nurturing and protective of others and they are often able to handle responsibility well and assume leadership roles. More than half the presidents of the United States have been oldest male children, and 21 of the first 23 American astronauts were oldest or only children. The world is often ruled by oldests, which reflects both the liabilities and the advantages of that position. World War II, for example, was conducted by oldest sons Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito along with only children Roosevelt and Stalin.

This sense of responsibility can also be a burden. Oldest children may turn into perfectionists and worriers, who dare not make mistakes or disappoint their parents (or other authority figures). Stutterers are often oldest children who are so fearful of saying something wrong that they can’t say it at all. Oldest children tend to have trouble accepting mistakes by others, too. They are the most likely of the children to internalize their parents’ expectations about being good. They conform to what is expected of them and tend to think in terms of what they and others “should” do. They may be trying so hard to achieve and be good in school, for instance, that they neglect to make friends. And, since they soon realize that nothing is ever perfect, many oldests tend to be pessimistic about the world in general and their life in particular.

Jimmy Carter, whose father set “seemingly impossible standards of performance” for him, became a lifelong perfectionist who could never openly rebel against his father’s harsh discipline, the Navy’s hazings, or Congressional disloyalty, according to biographers Bruce Mazlish and Edwin Diamond. His younger sister says that, “no matter how well Jimmy did, Daddy always said he could do better. Daddy always wanted Jimmy to go straight to the top.”

Youngest brother Billy, however, openly admits to not having Jimmy’s drive or his need to succeed. “It does not bother me to lose a softball game; it drives him crazy....I enjoy life.”

Oldests also tend to be compulsive to the degree that they can’t walk through a room without straightening the picture frames and can’t throw away a tin can without washing it first. A large percentage of people diagnosed as obsessive-compulsives are oldest children.

The emphasis on high achievement tends to make oldest children more tense, more serious, more reserved, and less playful than others. They usually work hard and are conscientious at whatever they do. They have learned to associate fun and play with the immaturity of their youngest siblings. Superachiever Meryl Streep has been called one of the most intelligent and perceptive actresses in Hollywood. The oldest sister of two brothers, she “looked like a mini-adult” as a child and had a “bossy streak.” One of her brothers referred to her as “pretty ghastly.”

If the standard of achievement in a particular family is measured by success in crime, the oldest will be a high achiever in that. The oldest may become the “godfather” or a gang leader.

The important thing for oldests is to have the admiration and respect of others. If it doesn’t come naturally, they may seek a position of authority in order to demand respect. They often appear to be arrogant when they are actually seeking reassurance.

Because failure seems so devastating to oldests, they find it difficult to accept even constructive criticism or to admit it when they are wrong. Oldests are often overfunctioners, which means that they take on responsibility for other people’s lives and problems as well as their own. They try to solve other people’s problems even though they don’t have the power to make their own solution work in someone else’s life. Other people often see these attempts to help as bossiness or intrusiveness, even when the intentions are good.

Oldests often have trouble turning down requests and over-commit themselves rather than disappoint someone. Some oldests feel they have to do it all and meet the needs of work, family, community, and church. Many an oldest child is the pillar of a community and the cornerstone of a church or other volunteer organization. They can’t say no, and they can’t understand why others don’t have the same dedication that they do. They will take on responsibilities and do work that really belongs to someone else. They often resent how much they have to do and how little time they have for themselves, but they aren’t able to stop. If anything goes, it is usually their relationships, which get sacrificed to the higher goal of achievement and success.

This tendency to over-commit may arise from their concern to take care of others. Some oldests are so concerned about being nurturing and pleasing others that they seem to be compliant. They allow themselves to be overworked in the same way they were overparented and are often pushed to their limits. They feel responsible for everything and think that if they don’t take care of it, it will fall apart.

Alternatively, they may be seeking recognition through trying to accomplish more than others do. They can be so goal-oriented and driven to succeed that they sacrifice themselves, their family, and their employees in order to be the best, the biggest, the richest, or even the most giving and sacrificial.

They don’t easily ask for help. They have trouble trusting in the ability of others, and even if they are able to delegate work, they aren’t able to delegate their anxiety about the work being done right. After all, their younger siblings could never do anything as well as they could.

Pierre was the oldest of six brothers and sisters and he was strongly encouraged by his father, also an oldest, to become like him — a demanding, directive, take-charge person. Pierre’s mother was often unable to function as a parent due to her serious depression. She was frequently hospitalized and absent from the family for long periods. Pierre was often the person who ran the household during these times. He became caring and helpful as well as a take-charge decision maker who organized his younger siblings to do the household chores. The more pressure he felt due to his mother’s absence and his father’s demands, the more organized and directive he became.

Later, he married a younger sister of a brother, who at first enjoyed Pierre’s leadership qualities. She felt safe and well taken care of by him as she had with her brother whom she admired. Over the years, however, she began to have bouts of depression and lethargy, during which Pierre ran the household. She started thinking that her identity was being eroded by Pierre’s take-charge way of organizing their lives. She did not know much about his childhood and simply began to think he was a born dictator.

During a number of therapy sessions, Pierre began to be aware of the anxiety that lay behind his impulse to take over a situation and start giving orders. His entire self-image was at stake. He feared that if he did not fulfill his prescribed role of leader when things got tough, he would not be accepted and the whole family would fall apart. He found his wife’s reactions quite puzzling at first because he genuinely believed he was just being loving.

It helped his wife to hear that Pierre’s anxiety about being accepted was what lay behind his behavior. She learned to see his actions in a different light. Although he felt tremendously vulnerable, Pierre eventually learned not to go into automatic take-charge mode when things got rough. He learned to feel more comfortable with his vulnerability and to appreciate his wife’s abilities and her input into joint decision making.

Even at play many oldest children work hard and are high achievers. It’s not enough to jog, they have to run — and win — a marathon. It’s not enough to have a friendly game of tennis, they have to attack the ball and demolish the opponent.

They are more likely than others in their family to experience jealousy and express anger. Unless their parents have been abusive physically, oldests most often express their anger verbally, which is quite effective since they tend to have high verbal skills. If they have experienced intense jealousy over the youngest, these feelings may be transferred to other scapegoats in the future — minorities or “welfare bums” — whom the oldest perceives as “getting away with things” and getting ahead “without doing a day’s work,” just like a younger sibling.