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Middle children, claim your crown—you've finally dethroned your siblings in new study

One of the largest birth order studies ever indicates that middle kids may make the best humans.

Middle children tend to score high on cooperative traits.

Fellow middle children, our time has finally come. We've been biding our time, knee deep in our Middle Child Syndrome, waiting for the truth we've known all along to come to light, and now it has. Research has determined that we, the middle children of the world, are officially the best.

At least that's what some of us are taking away from a birth order study published in December 2024, one of the largest ever to analyze whether birth order impacts personality. For decades, research has been mixed on that question and the most recent thinking based on data has been that birth order doesn't really matter, but that hasn't stopped people from assigning all kinds of personality traits to oldest, youngest, middle and only children. Now, however, according to Canadian researchers who sorted through personality survey responses from 700,000 adults, it appears that middle kids grow up to be more honest, humble, and agreeable—traits that are key elements of cooperation and collaboration.

In other words, we make the best humans, because what quality is more important in a civilized society than fair, honest, humble cooperation? None, that's what. (No questions, please. Let us middle kids have something, for the love.)

The study used the HEXACO personality inventory, which has become one of the most widely-used personality assessments in the past two decades. It measures six key traits, which are seen across cultures: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience.

"“Most previous research had found that adults’ personality trait levels were unrelated to their birth order,” study authors Michael Ashton of Brock University and Kibeom Lee of the University of Calgary told PsyPost. “When we started collecting online personality data about 10 years ago, we decided to include birth order in our survey, because we were measuring a wider array of personality traits than had been examined in previous research. We found—somewhat to our surprise—that birth order was related to some personality traits, and we then added a question to our survey about sibship size (i.e., number of siblings, including oneself).”

large family laughing while taking a photoPeople from large families tend to score higher on Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness. Photo credit: Canva

Middle children scored higher on Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness in the HEXACO framework, as did children from larger families. Here's how the researchers describe those traits:

Honesty-Humility:Persons with very high scores on the Honesty-Humility scale avoid manipulating others for personal gain, feel little temptation to break rules, are uninterested in lavish wealth and luxuries, and feel no special entitlement to elevated social status. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale will flatter others to get what they want, are inclined to break rules for personal profit, are motivated by material gain, and feel a strong sense of self-importance.

Agreeableness (versus Anger): Persons with very high scores on the Agreeableness scale forgive the wrongs that they suffered, are lenient in judging others, are willing to compromise and cooperate with others, and can easily control their temper. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale hold grudges against those who have harmed them, are rather critical of others' shortcomings, are stubborn in defending their point of view, and feel anger readily in response to mistreatment.

See? The best.

In all fairness (here's one of those strong middle child traits breaking through), the researchers did point out that the difference, while statistically significant, was modest and that you can't really draw any conclusions about any one individual based on their birth order.

"One way to think of it is like this: If you choose at random someone who was an only child and someone who grew up in a family of six or more kids, there’s a 60% chance that the more agreeable or cooperative person of these two will be the latter (as opposed to 50% if there were no difference). So, you can’t tell much about the personality of a given individual from their birth order or family size, even though there are clear differences when averaging across many people,” Ashton and Lee told Psypost.

Whatever. Middle children know. We've always known. Oldest kids get the leadership skills. Youngest kids get to be spoiled. Let us have this one thing.

Photo: Canva

We're nearly a year into the pandemic, and what a year it has been. We've gone through the struggles of shutdowns, the trauma of mass death, the seemingly fleeting "We're all in this together" phase, the mind-boggling denial and deluge of misinformation, the constantly frustrating uncertainty, and the ongoing question of when we're going to get to resume some sense of normalcy.

It's been a lot. It's been emotionally and mentally exhausting. And at this point, many of us have hit a wall of pandemic fatigue that's hard to describe. We're just done with all of it, but we know we still have to keep going.

Poet Donna Ashworth has put this "done" feeling into words that are resonating with so many of us. While it seems like we should want to talk to people we love more than ever right now, we've sort of lost the will to socialize pandemically. We're tired of Zoom calls. Getting together masked and socially distanced is doable—we've been doing it—but it sucks. In the wintry north (and recently south) the weather is too crappy to get together outside. So many of us have just gone quiet.

If that sounds like you, you're not alone. As Ashworth wrote:


You're not imagining it, nobody seems to want to talk right now.

Messages are brief and replies late.

Talk of catch ups on zoom are perpetually put on hold.

Group chats are no longer pinging all night long.

It's not you.

It's everyone.

We are spent.

We have nothing left to say.

We are tired of saying 'I miss you' and 'I can't wait for this to end'.

So we mostly say nothing, put our heads down and get through each day.

You're not imagining it.

This is a state of being like no other we have ever known because we are all going through it together but so very far apart.

Hang in there my friend.

When the mood strikes, send out all those messages and don't feel you have to apologise for being quiet.

This is hard.

No one is judging.

- Donna Ashworth

Those of us who find ourselves feeling this way certainly hope that no one is judging. We hope that our friends understand, either because they're in the same boat or because we all get that we're all handling this weird time differently.

It's not that we don't care or that we don't miss people outside of our household desperately. It's more that we miss people so much that we can't stand this half-baked way of being with people anymore. Personally, I'd rather just wait it out until we get enough people vaccinated over the next few months. I'm holding out for the hugs, man. Going into hermit mode in this final stretch feels more doable than straining to make socializing work with all the limitations and the exhaustion on top of it.

There are exceptions, of course. People who live alone probably need whatever socializing they can get. And checking in with people, especially loved ones you know struggle with mental health issues, is important. Some of this pandemic wall can be veiled depression, so we need to look out for one another and touch base sometimes. It's also good for us to make connections even when we don't necessarily feel like it. Sometimes the desire might be lacking, but we're happy to have connected once we've done it.

And of course, there are people who have just pretended that the pandemic isn't happening this whole time. Maybe those people aren't feeling this, even while they're making life harder for the rest of us who are trying to follow the guildelines.

It's all just hard. There's no right or wrong way to make it through a pandemic, as long as we're not actively harming ourselves or other people. Everyone has different needs, and those change as we go through different phases of this thing. It's just nice to see a common feeling in this phase put into words so eloquently.

Donna Ashworth has published a whole book of poems about the pandemic called "History Will Remember When the World Stopped." She also has a book of poetry for women, "To The Women: Words to Live By."

The arts are always a gift, but they can be especially powerful during tough times. Thank you, Ms. Ashworth, for using your words to give voice to what so many of us are experiencing.

We all know that millennials are entitlement-oozing, spoiled, special snowflakes, who need to grow up, get over themselves, and get a damn job.

[rebelmouse-image 19533104 dam="1" original_size="700x364" caption="And need to cool it with those damn selfie sticks. Photo by Marco Verch/Flickr." expand=1]And need to cool it with those damn selfie sticks. Photo by Marco Verch/Flickr.

But ... science just won't stop telling us we're wrong about that.

A new study, which will be published in the journal "Psychological Science," found that even after all those participation trophies, helicopter parents, selfies, Insta-pics, and snappy chats, young people these days are ... basically no more self-absorbed than young people 30 years ago.


Or, most likely, young people 30 years before that, according to the study's authors.

The researchers surveyed the scores of tens of thousands of college students who took the Narcissism Personality Inventory test between 2000 and 2017. The average student scored between 15 and 16 on the 40-point scale, a slight decrease from their peers in the 1990s.

"There never was a narcissism epidemic, despite what has been claimed," lead researcher Brent Roberts, psychology professor at the University of Illinois, said in a news release.

Recent research has increasingly found that elevated self-regard is simply a developmental hallmark of adolescence.

"We have faulty memories, so we don’t remember that we were rather self-centered when we were that age," Roberts explained.

A 2013 study found that a common teenage brain process that increased self-centeredness also boosts information retention, allowing young people to learn faster and hold on to memories better than adults.

While we were busy self-esteem-shaming them in the pages of magazines, millennials were getting up to some pretty selfless stuff.

[rebelmouse-image 19533105 dam="1" original_size="700x479" caption="Photo by The All-Nite Images/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by The All-Nite Images/Flickr.

The Millennial Impact Report, published in 2015, found that 70% of that generation volunteer, and more than 80% report giving to charity.

Some of them are criss-crossing the United States trying to make it easier for people to vote.

Others are breaking new ground in infectious disease research and bringing award-winning science and medicine to rural regions of the world.

Still others are campaigning for racial justice and attempting to build a more equal, less violent society.

If that's where being lazy, entitled, and self-absorbed leads, perhaps other generations should follow. Getting a selfie stick would be a good start.