An Unquiet Mind

My cousin, an eldest sib­ling, alerted me to this news find­ing: The eldest chil­dren in fam­i­lies tend to develop higher I.Q.’s than their sib­lings, researchers are report­ing, in a large study that could set­tle more than a half-century of sci­en­tific debate about the rela­tion­ship between I.Q. and birth order.

Salient Points

• The study was car­ried out only on men. Researchers say sex doesn’t mat­ter, and that find­ings would apply equally to females.
• The researchers looked at IQ scores in 250,000 men enter­ing manda­tory mil­i­tary ser­vice. They found a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings.
• Men who were first in social or birth order had, on aver­age an IQ about 2.3 points higher than those who were sec­ond in social or birth order. This pat­tern con­tin­ued in the sense that sec­ond born men had higher IQs than the third born, and so on.
• The causes are social, not biological.

My Obser­va­tions

• Inter­est­ingly, about a year ago, Med­ical News had reported find­ings about a sim­i­lar study, con­ducted in the US, with exactly oppo­site results.
• Though the study doesn’t cover sin­gle chil­dren, the social fac­tors that are cited as respon­si­ble for higher IQ in elder sib­lings would work won­ders when there’s only a sin­gle child. So does this mean coun­tries like China, with a one-child-per-family pro­gram will pro­duce a nation of geniuses?

For Par­ents

• Par­ents should not be unduly con­cerned about these results. Hav­ing high IQ and know­ing how to use it are dif­fer­ent attributes.
• A child might score a few points lower in their IQ but have other assets such as curios­ity, imag­i­na­tion and what is increas­ingly being called “emo­tional intel­li­gence” that helps them use their IQ more effectively.
• If you have sev­eral chil­dren, then spend­ing some one-to-one time with each one is prob­a­bly a good thing to do but if you can’t man­age it, don’t lose sleep over it.
• Par­ents who rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent niches that their chil­dren fill can enhance the family’s intel­lec­tual envi­ron­ment by exploit­ing each child’s exper­tise, researchers say.
• While even slight dif­fer­ences in I.Q. score can be impor­tant for some, the test mea­sures a nar­row set of skills. Exces­sive atten­tion to it can blind par­ents to the diverse and equally rich exper­tise that later-born chil­dren usu­ally develop.

For Elder Sib­lings

• Chill out!

For Younger Siblings

Don’t despair:

• You can kill your elder sib­lings (as sug­gested by another youngest-in-family cousin)
• If the above sounds anath­ema to you (even if you have low IQ), you can encour­age your par­ents to have more chil­dren (so you’ll have higher IQ than them)
• You already have impres­sive friends and are in dis­tin­guished company
• Evi­dence sug­gests that younger sib­lings are more likely than older ones to take risks based on their knowl­edge and instincts.
• The study did not look at the effect of age gaps on IQ. But pre­vi­ous research has sug­gested that a younger sib­ling with a large enough age gap might be able to recoup the IQ points.
• The study was con­ducted in Nor­way. If you’re Nor­we­gian, as per Asterix, you’ve noth­ing to fear. Even if you’re not, you’ve noth­ing to fear. The study doesn’t talk about cul­tural dif­fer­ences in upbringing.
• It doesn’t mean younger sib­lings aren’t more intel­li­gent in other ways, like emo­tional intelligence.

Fur­ther, the New York Times quotes experts:

To dis­tin­guish them­selves, younger sib­lings often develop other skills, like social charm, a good curve­ball, mas­tery of the elec­tric bass, act­ing skills. They are devel­op­ing diverse inter­ests and exper­tise that the I.Q. tests do not measure.

This kind of exper­i­men­ta­tion might explain evi­dence that younger sib­lings often live more adven­tur­ous lives than their older brother or sis­ter. They are more likely to par­tic­i­pate in dan­ger­ous sports than eldest chil­dren, and more likely to travel to exotic places. They tend to be less con­ven­tional than first­borns, and some of the most provoca­tive and influ­en­tial fig­ures in sci­ence spent their child­hoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister.

First­borns have won more Nobel Prizes in sci­ence than younger sib­lings, but often by advanc­ing cur­rent under­stand­ing, rather than over­turn­ing it.

It’s the dif­fer­ence between every-year or every-decade cre­ativ­ity and every-century cre­ativ­ity,” Dr. Sul­loway said, “between inno­va­tion and rad­i­cal innovation”.

Related posts:

1. Child Sex Tourism in India
2. Indian Child Abuse Sta­tis­tics — What Can We Do?
3. A Lesser Known Mutineer
4. Men­tally Chal­lenged, Raped, Preg­nant. Abort?