How Your Birth Order Influences Your Life Adjustment - Summary:

“How Your Birth Order Influences Your Life Adjustment” by Lucille K. Forer is about accurate description of our birth order. While getting birth, we take a certain place in the family hierarchy. We welcome only child oldest child, middle child, or youngest child.

For oldest child, the parents usually expect to be more capable and more responsible that the younger children. Oldest child thinks, in the same way, being self-conceptual i.e. seeing himself, thinking about himself.

The middle child thinks he is more capable than younger siblings. Sometime he takes help from older siblings or parents. So, he thinks of himself as being able to obtain help when he needs it.

Youngest child may develop the self-concept that he is less able to do many things than other people. He gets help from others. His demands are tend to be fulfilled easily.

Only child tends to think that he is helpless in the absence of his parents. So, he learns to take care of himself as much as possible.

Hence, the article is about the birth order and its influence on determining responsibilities, thinking, behavior and temperament.

Important Questions:

1. Is Forer’s discussion of birth order accurate or inaccurate for the children in your family? Explain.
Ans:-  I think the birth order theory mentioned by Lucille Forer is accurate for the children in my family in the sense that it is exactly the same as mentioned by the author in the essay. It is so that I am the oldest child in my family and I have younger sister and brother.

When I was the only child of my parents, I had to be dependent on so many things with my parents and other senior members in my family. Whenever I didn’t find parents and other older people in my family I used to feel insecure. But when there was the birth of my brother and sister, they started to be depended on me and I started to be a junior parent for them because whenever I didn’t find parents, they came with me and ask so many questions in one hand and on the other hand, they started considering me as their path-shower.

Similarly, when I was the only child in the family all the family members’ attention was centered towards me but when my brother and sister arrived, their attention towards me gradually decreased in the sense that they found my younger sister and brother the one to be given more attention. So it was an ego to me in one hand and on the other hand, it became a challenge to be as I started be grown as an independent and later on my younger brother and sister started to be dependent on me.

Finally, I strongly accept that the birth order theory prepared by the author is accurate to my family as I am the elder child in my family and I have been more responsible over my younger brother and sister. And, in some cases I have to behave like that of their parents as well as whenever they do not find parents, they regard me as their small parents.

2. Withers tells us that the birth order of spouses can affect the success of their marriage. Do you think people’s birth order also affects their choices of friends? Who they choose to work with? Explain.
Ans:-  I think that whatever the author mentioned about birth order has an important role in making marital life either successful or unsuccessful. After reading this article, I have considered some of the couples in my locality and I think that whatever she told in the article is to be found correct. Because it has been seen that if the husband in the family is elder child  and the wife is also the same, they have problems in their adjustments.

On the other hand, in some families if the spouses are of only child of their parents, they also are found to be quarrelling in minor mistakes of another.