Parlor Spider...Step In, Little Fly

Insightful thoughts and/or rants from atop the soapbox from one who wishes to share the "right" opinion with everyone.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Tiffany Didn't Come to Iola, Kansas








younger and older sibs

If there's one truth to this world it's that siblings are completely different people, even though raised by the exact same parents in the same way. There are, of course, various theories as to why this is true, and siblings themselves have tried to figure out what qualities distinguished them from each other if only to find out which ones the parents liked better (or best in the case of more than two).
To be honest, I always thought my brother was the preferred child because he was so much more like my parents than I was. The idea of my being adopted did not occur to me. I just presumed that he, being older, had the inside track to the rules of being a kid while I was kept in the dark. He always did better than I did in school, too, and now I KNOW WHY: he was smarter than I! (and probably still is)
Tiffany Frank, a doctoral student at Adelphi University, has just published a study that seems to indicate that first born children score higher on tests of intelligence. Her study of 90 pairs of siblings in a diverse, New York high school and published by the American Psychological Association seems to bear that out. Siblings were asked questions concerning each other's intelligence, work ethic and academic performance and correlated all of that information with test and intelligence scores. No doubt: first born children scored better, but there is a catch.
It seems that later siblings actually did better in school in terms of grade point average than did their older siblings. Frank posits that the younger ones are more competitive and seek to outdo the first born children who had, if only briefly, the experience of all their parents' attention since they were only children for at least a year.
Well, Frank never met Fred and me.
We went in completely different directions, and I have yet to outdo him in anything. I recently admitted to him that I learned to write essays in school by copying an old notebook he had handed in a couple of years earlier. He dropped out of junior college while I have a master's degree. he earns about five times what I do and has yet to retire because his company provides stock options and incentives to keep him around. My school couldn't wait to hire somebody cheaper than me!
sigh.
At least my front tooth isn't chipped like his though I see he's finally given up wearing cutoff jeans.

1 Comments:

At 9:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh the joys of sibling rivalry. I don't think it ever ends - no matter how old we get.

 

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