Dee and I have both noticed that Munchkin and BigBrother are awfully similar. Not just in looks, though that’s there, but in their personalities. It has me thinking about birth order and how it affects our personalities.
Technically, in their everyday households, both Munchkin and BigBrother are “oldest” children. They act like oldest children. They are determined. They are confident. They’re leaders — which conflicts, by the way, when they are trying to play. They are eager to please. They like to avoid trouble. It goes on and on. As an oldest child myself, I recognize some of the pressures on BigBrother and try to find a balance in how I treat him, but he’s very typical in this way.
I will never know how their personalities might differ if Munchkin was being raised in this home and he was actually a middle child instead of an oldest. (As an aside, LittleBrother is most certainly a youngest… as is my husband.) It’s hard to imagine him as anything but himself, but I recognize that things might very well be different if she was part of our everyday family.
I’ve been asking other birth parents about their experiences with this topic: the technical discrepancy between being the oldest but still acting like the oldest. It’s not overly surprising that many other families have the same experience. They say that children born more than five years apart in the same household will show older/only child type personality traits. And so I’m not overly surprised that two children being raised in separate homes as oldest children would display those traits. It makes sense to me on a logical level.
But logic doesn’t always translate to the heart.
The good news is that BigBrother has stopped being so overprotective of the title “oldest.” I don’t correct him. He is the oldest here. But every now and then, when he says it, he’ll mention his sister. You can see his wheels processing it and thinking about what it means. It’s kind of amazing how his mind works, even at this age. I know he loves lording his birth order over his brother, but he doesn’t seem threatened by his sister at all — which is important to me. I will just have to continue reinforcing that he is who he is and that she is who she is and that we don’t always understand everything about personalities and why we are who we are. Of course, that’s getting a little ahead of where we are in our discussions.
He just wants to go first when we play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.