Are Firstborn Children More Intelligent Than Their Younger Siblings?

Feb 26, 2018 by apost team

Older siblings have been convinced in their superiority to their younger siblings since the dawn of time. The thing is, that may actually be true, at least when it comes to IQ. Don’t get mad, younger sibs, you’re good at other stuff. Middle siblings are great peacemakers, and younger siblings are often the most creative and social. But let’s talk about how smart those eldest children are. A recent study published in the Journal of Human Resources shows that firstborn children may have higher intelligence when compared with their younger siblings. The likely reason for this is that parents have more time to devote to mental stimulation when they only have one kid on their hands. The study analyzed data for 5000 children in the United States who were enrolled in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The children were tested every two years on their thinking skills such as vocabulary and reading comprehension. Eldest children scored the highest on these assessments, with the difference becoming apparent as early as toddlerhood. Parents’ time to devote to studies and things that develop children’s thinking skills such as reading and crafts gets slimmer with each additional child, giving the eldest child a leg up on their siblings. The study says that emotional support was constant between children, and the largest difference came in intelligence measuring. This added intellectual support is shown to prime firstborns to succeed both financially and academically when they’re older. They are more likely to strive for achievement and on average eldest children are more likely to succeed in life. Ana Nuevo-Chiquero, the lead author on the study, states, “Our results suggest that broad shifts in parental behavior are a plausible explanation for the observed birth order differences in education and labor market outcomes,” Therefore all you little sibs can blame your parents if you don’t succeed in school. So now all the older siblings arguing that they are smarter than their dumb little brothers and sisters are backed up by some pretty solid statistics. Watch out for them, we might have created some monsters.