Abstract
A substantial amount of research shows that younger siblings perform worse than their older sisters and brothers in several socioeconomic outcomes, including educational achievement. Most of these studies examined stable families and excluded half-siblings. However, the increasing prevalence of multipartnered fertility implies that many children grow up in nonnuclear families. We examine whether there is evidence for birth order effects in this context, which offers an opportunity to test and potentially expand the explanatory scope of the two main theories on birth order effects. We use comprehensive Norwegian registry data to study siblings in the 1985–1998 cohorts born to mothers or fathers who parented children with at least two partners. We provide evidence for negative effects of birth order on lower secondary school grades in both cases. Children born to fathers displaying multipartnered fertility tend to have lower grades than older full siblings but perform more similarly or better compared with older half-siblings. For siblings born to mothers with the multipartnered fertility pattern, later-born siblings do worse in school compared with all older siblings. This indicates that negative birth order effects tend to operate either within or across sets of full siblings, depending on the sex of the parent displaying multipartnered fertility. We argue that these findings can be explained by a combination of resource dilution/confluence theory and sex differences in residential arrangements following union dissolutions. We also suggest an alternative interpretation: maternal resources could be more important for generating negative birth order effects.
Highlights
We argue that it is reasonable to expect negative birth order effects based on the two theories, but three key issues need to be accounted for to derive more specific predictions: (1) the distinction between overall and full biological birth order, (2) the significance of union dissolutions and family complexity, and (3) sex-differentiated parental behavior
The association between school points and overall birth order is weaker in the father-based sample compared with that found in the nuclear family sample. This is consistent with the findings presented in panel a of Fig. 1, which indicate that negative effects of overall birth order cannot be clearly discerned for children with fathers displaying multipartnered fertility
Our first question asks whether associations between birth order and educational achievement exist in the context of multipartnered fertility
Summary
The extant literature, both methodically rigorous and empirically rich, generally limits its scope to studying stable nuclear families. This approach has clearly served as a good starting point for birth order research given that traditional family patterns are still the most prevalent in Western countries, including Norway (Lappegård and Rønsen 2013; Thomson 2014). Estimates for representative samples or populations from the United States, Australia, Sweden, and Norway found that between 10% and 20% of mothers and fathers display this fertility behavior based on data of births occurring from the 1980s to the early 2000s (Thomson et al 2014). We analyze two samples that include siblings who share either a father or a mother displaying multipartnered fertility
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