Where do you fit in your family? Are you a first born? The middle child? Perhaps, like me, you’re the youngest of your family.
I speak to a range of regular guests on my morning radio programme on 98.5 Sonshine FM. Every fortnight on a Tuesday I speak to clinical psychologist Genevieve Milnes M.App.Psych, MA (Couns), B.Ed, B.Div from the Belmont Counselling Clinic. We chat about a range of issues from family history to personality types, depression, sexual abuse and a lot more.
Today we started looking at the fascinating issue of birth order.
Birth order is defined as a person’s rank by age among his or her siblings. Birth order is often believed to have a profound and lasting effect on psychological development. This assertion has been repeatedly challenged by researchers, yet birth order continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture. – Wikipedia
Have you ever looked into the topic? Do you think you carry the characteristics normally associated with your place in your family?
If you’d like to know more about the subject just click the play button on the audio player at the bottom of this post.
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Michael Grose wrote a fascinating book on this subject called, Why first borns rule the world and last borns want to change it. He explains his theory like this: “Birth-order theory works so well because we are social beings trying to find a niche in our social groups. The first social group we belong to is our family. Within our family we compete with our siblings for different places, positions or niches.”
Thanks Susan. I’ll have to track down the book and read a little more about the topic for the coming weeks.
Llove the picture you chose for the post. Sounds like an interesting interview, I’ll certainly listen to it. I’m middle of 3 daughters, second child syndrome? 🙂
I’m an only child so I’m selfish, rude, don’t know how to get on with others and am a serial killer. Obviously.