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I apologize for my long vacation from posting here. A shoulder fracture from a horseback riding accident (more on horses in a later post) sidelined me from any typing activities for the last month or so. But as the date approaches for the publication of "The Secret Power of Middle Children", I've been thinking again about the results of our recent study on birth order and parenting style. A few years ago, I remember reading a discussion of the relative merits of self-report of personality versus peer or parental report. A number of researchers have received somewhat different results depending on who is doing the rating.
And so when we asked parents about their parenting behavior we also had them evaluate the parenting behavior of their spouses, thinking that self-impression management wouldn't transfer to the spouses. Most people aren't super keen on being seen as authoritarian parents, at least in North America these days. One way of thinking about parenting styles is as authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. For an explanation of these three styles, check out this explanation of Baumrind's model.
We had predicted more authoritarian styles for firstborns, more authoritative for middles, and more permissive for lastborns. Well, we had two interesting results. One was that the middles were more permissive than the babies of the family, which was a surprise to us...the middles actually scored highly on authoritative and permissive scales. We interpreted this, after reading some of the comments that were included, as providing rules and structure but allowing for a sense of independence and choice as well. It's also worth noting that middles tend to have a strong negotiating style in the relationships which likely translates into how they deal with working out their desires versus their children's. Middles can be a bit indulgent of their children and their desires because they are not always so strongly insistent on getting their own way.
Firstborns were the most authoritarian, not a surprise, and lastborns were an interesting mix of indulgence and wanting the kids to do what they (the parent) wanted (sometimes without the guidance of clear rules).
But another interesting result was that some of these birth order differences were only significant when the rating was of the spouse. In particular, the ratings on the authoritarian scale were very low across the board when rating self but there was a great deal more variation when rating one's spouse on that scale. In terms of the permissiveness scale, the high ratings for middleborns were found in both the self and spousal ratings. Of course, it would also be interesting to have the children rate these same traits in their parents over time (do they all see parents the same way as children but as they grow up, perceive the differences in style?) and see if the children and parents have good agreement or not on how they parent. If they all converged on the same picture, it makes a pretty convincing one. Which again, points out the value of asking your research questions in different ways to different folk.
