Mags Gargan
We allocate labels to children that can be self-fulfilling
A friend told me recently that she was having continuous back problems caused by endlessly carrying her youngest son. Despite the fact that he is five years old she still sees him as a baby. I know that despite her 42 years my sister, the baby of our family, often feels that her opinions and decisions carry less weight than those of older family members.
There is a wealth of psychological research which identifies the birth order of siblings in families to individual personality and identity development. Research also links birth order to success in a wide range of arenas from academia to romance but says very little on the different experiences of being a big brother, a middle child or the family baby.
We expend huge effort on categorising and labelling our world in order to make some sense of it and whether consciously or not we do the same to our children. We allocate labels; she is the smart one, the responsible one, the sensitive one and so on. These legacies can last well into adulthood and be notoriously difficult to shake off. We forget that these are not absolute realities of a person they are value judgements which often say more about the needs of those attaching them than they do about the recipient.
Self-fulfilling
Unfortunately they can be self-fulfilling. Calling a child hopeless at sport, clumsy or bad at reading is more likely to push our children into self-doubt and paralysis than to act as a catalyst towards change. We can do nothing about where our children fall in the order of the family but we can be mindful of the language we use when we talk to them and about them.
Apparently when I was younger one of my favourite ways of getting someone to do what I wanted was to well up with tears and say “I’m just a little girl and I’m scared”. It worked. I manipulated and others acquiesced but as a life skill it was woefully inadequate.
Our daughter may be a sister and our baby, but she is first and foremost a very unique self. We tell her that she is strong and clever and capable and when she tries to get her way by bursting into tears or whining we suggest using her strong voice to ask for what she really wants.
The family she inhabits is vastly different from the family that her eldest brother was born into and her experiences will be shaped accordingly. Where we taught our eldest to swim with structured lessons, our daughter learned through necessity; fleeing up the pool away from two advancing ‘shark’ brothers. Instead of anxious parents guiding her towards mastery of her pink bicycle she has two brothers running alongside her, supporting, yelling advice and dusting her off when she topples over.
In a wonderful reciprocity of interaction she tempers her brothers, softens their hard edges and fosters their empathic and playful sides. The harsh reality for all families is that parental resources are finite and each successive child almost always enjoys a smaller piece of the pie than their elder siblings. As a result there are many things that our youngest child will never have; our undivided attention, the privileged position of eldest or first grandchild, two sane parents or the largest bedroom. However, access to her brother’s worlds has expanded her broad and colourful vocabulary, ensured she develops a healthy ability to stand up for herself and in general have less neuroses and hang-ups. Best of all she will have someone to teach her to drive when her parents have given up!
