Parents, it’s time to stop coddling your younger kids!
Firstborn children: Basically: you’re the experimental child. And sometimes being the first born sucks BIG-TIME because occasionally you’ll want to forfeit all responsibilities that come along with the title. But a new study shows that it all seems to pay off in the end.
The study released from National Bureau of Economic Research found that firstborn children are excelling more in school than their younger siblings.
So what’s exactly creating this difference? Apparently, it’s all about how parents treat the firstborns. Researchers noticed that parents’ restrictions on their kids become less and less according to their birth order. (Not that we needed science to make that observation). As a result, younger siblings school performance declines along with birth order.
During the study, parents were asked how they would respond if their younger students brought home bad grades and they said they would be less likely to punish them, whereas they would’ve punished the first-born.
Yikes, seems a little unfair. But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right babies of the family?