Middle children rule.
That’s according to a new study suggesting the longest-suffering siblings grow up to be “better” than their rivals — adding to the long-running debate over whether or not order of birth can predict personality.
Pioneering Austrian psychologist Albert Adler first floated that concept at least a century ago — and the pros have been fighting over his ideas ever since.
While the science may have yet to be settled, stereotypes have long filled the void — from the image of the assertive, intelligent firstborn to the timeworn “spoiled” label affixed to the youngest in a family.
Nobody takes it on the chin, perhaps, more than middle children, who even have a so-called “Middle-child syndrome” named after them.
This is described by WebMD as “the idea that if you’re neither the oldest child nor the youngest, you get less attention from your parents and feel ‘caught in the middle’.”
That’s a good thing, according to the Canadian authors of the study, Michael Ashton of Brock University and Kibeom Lee of the University of Calgary.
Middle children, they say, wind up “more honest, humble and agreeable than their siblings,” an analysis of the academic work published by Parents stated, wondering if this in fact made them “better.”
The head-shrinking survey used a test known as the HEXACO Personality Inventory, which examines six traits in humans — honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
When it came to honesty-humility and agreeableness, middle children scored the highest.
That means they can “forgive the wrongs that they suffered, are lenient in judging others, are willing to compromise and cooperate with others, and can easily control their temper,” according to the test.
A high score in the honesty-humility category, test authors said, means that a person would “avoid manipulating others for personal gain” and be “uninterested in lavish wealth and luxuries, and feel no special entitlement to elevated social status.”
Middle children may have made the top grade in both categories, but they were followed up by the youngest in a family. The eldest scored lowest on these two fronts. Only children also fared poorly.
According to Parents, other recent studies seeking to find if birth order correlates to personality type conflict with the latest findings — the outlet cited a 2020 study positing that one doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other.
Only children, authors of that paper said, were not guaranteed to be more narcissistic than their counterparts with multiple siblings, for example.
Famous middle children include Martin Luther King, Jr., Madonna, Warren Buffett and Abraham Lincoln.
