Perceived parental favoritism, closeness to kin, and the rebel of the family: The effects of birth order and sex

Abstract

We tested various predictions based on Sulloway's [ Born to rebel: birth order, family dynamics, and creative lives. New York: Pantheon, 1996] theory of family relations, using questionnaires completed by 2024 participants from Austria, Germany, Israel, Norway, Russia, and Spain, each of whom had at least one sibling. The parents' most favored child tended to be the lastborn sibling. The rebel of the family tended to be a laterborn, and rebels tended to feel less close to their parents. In sibships of two, firstborns named a parent as the person to whom they were closest more often than did lastborns; in sibships of three or more, middleborns were the least likely to name their mother, but were more likely than firstborns and lastborns to name their father or a sibling. However, these quadratic effects on closeness to parents occurred only in sibships in which mothers were relatively old at the time of participant's birth. Sex differences, but not birth order differences, were found in the tendency to choose parents for emotional support, with women scoring higher than men. Our study demonstrates the robustness of birth order differences in samples from diverse countries and emphasizes that these differences may occur only in interaction with moderating variables, such as mother's age at participant's birth.