From being both a twin and the youngest of my household (by just 14 minutes), I find that being a sibling is often both a blessing and a curse; because while I might disagree with them on certain things I also know that I wouldn’t be where I am without having their help from problems that they have already been through. 

One stigma that’s in many households is how many siblings tend to find or realize how older siblings get more discipline and punishments from parents while the younger are seen as more free-willed with less punishments overall. Yet, I find that the question is similar to comparing apples to oranges in the sense that they don’t know what the family dynamic is, what the age gap between siblings is, the gender of the siblings, or even if the parents of the house get along or not or even live separately. These factors play entirely into the family’s social dynamic and most importantly how well each person acts and gets along within the household. 

So here is an idea: Say you are the younger sibling who currently has an older sibling. Who do you think would get away with more and be more successful in life? The younger or older? Notice how everything depends entirely on those principles? Because truthfully, while the younger might get away with more, it could also be the idea of parental burnout. 

From New Port Academy, “Parents have been experiencing stress and burnout for decades, maybe even centuries. But Belgian psychology researchers Isabelle Roskam and Moïra Mikolajczak were the first to put a name to parental burnout, in the early 1980’s” and “described as ‘an exhaustion syndrome.’” 

Parental burnout not only affects how the parents of the household feel and act but how they manage to find themselves being “emotionally distanced from their children” and “a sense of ineffectiveness as a parent.” 

While this is extreme, most parents “spend five hours and 18 minutes a day worrying about their kids” with “59 percent of parents admitting that sometimes the worry is so great it leads to a loss of sleep.” (statistic from The New York Post) 

So while parents are worried about what the oldest child might do for the future, it only directly helps the kid who needs to be prepared when they first go to college, get a job and figure out what they want to do in life. Because truthfully, birth order doesn’t impact who you are as a person and what you might achieve within life.