Middle Children Are Going Extinct, Just When We Could Use Them the Most

I don’t need to ask you what you’re doing on August 12, 2018. You’re no doubt planning to attend your local Middle Child Day parade, or take in a lecture on Famous Middle Children Throughout History , or perhaps treat your own middle child to a special Middle Child’s dinner, then come home and cut your Happy Middle Child Day cake into several perfectly equal pieces, then crack open a bottle of Middle Sister wine to celebrate.

This holds true not just in space-and-time-and-money-crunched New York, but all across the country: Families with two or fewer kids have become the norm for every demographic group. Middle children, the most populous birth-order demographic throughout most of human history, will soon be the tiniest. Growing up, I certainly was always aware that the middle was not a position to be envied, even as I came to see typical middle-child traits in myself. Middle children are natural mediators; I avoid conflict and habitually act as the family mediator. Middle children tend to be private but also starved for affection; I keep to myself but am not exactly attention-averse. Yet unlike Shirley Manson, I never felt my middleness stood in the way of a happy life.

Nonetheless, watching The Brady Bunch, I instinctively associated with Peter, who seemed more self-aware than heartthrob Greg and less irritating than mewling baby Bobby.

Or consider the case of Naomi, the middle sister between two boys. When she was a kid, her uncle would try to bribe her and her brothers into good behavior by handing out behavior points toward an eventual reward. Her younger brother, Blake, who was 5, was having trouble with potty training, so he got extra points whenever he made it to the bathroom and did not pee his pants.

For Hopman, middle children are primarily distinguished by an inexhaustible need for attention, a description from which he does not exempt himself. “Britney Spears: middle child,” he points out. “Kesha: middle child. Nicki Minaj: middle child. Also a middle child: Don King.” He cites these celebrities in support of his theory that, if nothing else, “middle children have distinguished themselves by mastering the art of doing funny things to get attention with their hair.

But Adler also believed that, by virtue of being burdened neither by excessive expectation nor excessive attention , middleborns are uniquely poised to succeed. Adler himself was the youngest of two boys, a sickly child who was fiercely competitive with his older brother, Sigmund. So, though not a middle himself, Adler believed that middles were naturally even-tempered and, due to their recognition of the injustice of their own situation, the most likely to fight against injustice in the world.

But we have the children of divorced parents who hate each other to replace them :)

2nd born with no third have the same circumstances in my personal experience.

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