Abstract
The ability to defend the boundaries of one’s empirical self — dispositional sovereignty — is a personality trait with a great adaptive value. It develops through the generalization of everyday actions aimed at protecting the boundaries in discrete situations with other people, first, with one’s family. This paper explores the role of sibling status (birth order) in the development of this trait. Two empirical studies were conducted. In the first of them, carried out with the participation of children aged from two to ten, it is shown that the most mature ways of protection are for only children in the family, the least mature are the first children, and the second children in the family demonstrate an intermediate level of development of boundary protection skills. In the second study conducted on the youth sample, it is shown that the relationship between sovereignty and the order of birth depends on gender: sovereignty hits its peak among younger girls and older boys.
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