Book challenges perception middle children resentful
Nelson Mandela, Donald Trump, Madonna, Abraham Lincoln, Pierre Trudeau, Charles Darwin, Bill Gates, David Letterman and the Dalai Lama are all middle children.
A new book is challenging our ideas about birth order, dispelling “the idea that middles are resentful and angry.”
The book questions the birth-order excuse that middle children feel neglected or overlooked.
Instead, The Secret Power of Middle Children claims middle children “actually learn adaptive strategies that can help them have better relationships and careers,” benefiting from more freedom than their older siblings.
It’s often the eldest children who feel the pressure of great expectations from parents.
Middle children, with less pressure from the parental unit, have the opportunities to discover their strengths and talents “on their own time and in their own way, and then excel at that,” says Catherine Salmon, the book’s co-author.
[See also: What your birth order says about you]
This independence and freedom leads many middle-borns to thrive in business and politics, adopting out-of-the-box problem-solving strategies.
Fifty-two per cent of American presidents are middle children, co-author Katrin Schumann told NPR. (Many aren’t aware of this, as earlier statistics didn’t include firstborn girls as older siblings. Times have changed.)
The presidential birth order likely contributed to their diplomatic skills.
Firstborns get what they want, either through force or parent-granted authority. The youngest are more likely to whine or seek parental sympathies when they don’t get their own way.
With neither authority nor “I’m the baby, look at me” strategies available to middle children, they learn to negotiate in order to get what they want.
“So they often get very good at negotiating, figuring out what the other person wants and needs, and then managing to get them what they want and what the middle child themselves want at the same time.
"And, of course, one of the things that middle children often want is peace and calm and quiet and for everybody to get along. And so those traits then serve them well when they leave the family and go on to form their own families, and in the workplace,” Salmon told NPR.
Salmon told The Globe and Mail that middle children, despite the Jan Brady stereotype, seem to be quite well-adjusted, and are “less likely to seek therapy than other birth orders.”
Does your own birth order reflect these conclusions? Are you a diplomatic middle child?
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