They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life - Revised and Updated Edition

by Oliver James

One of the commonest retorts to such evidence is to ask the question: ‘How do you explain the fact that I’m so different from my siblings? We had the same parents, were raised in the same house, had the same upbringing – so how come our brains don’t have similar patterns? It must be due to different genes.’ The answer is the remarkable fact that siblings don’t have the same parents. Each parent treats each child so differently that they might as well have been raised in completely different families. Believe it or not, our uniqueness has far more to do with that than with our genes. In the 1990s there

At least as big a determinant as gender on the role in which your parents cast you in the family drama is your place in the family, known as birth order. Although there are many exceptions to the following rules, firstborn children are more likely to be self-assured, assertive, competitive and dominant compared with lastborns. Firstborns are exceptionally common among leaders, such as prime ministers and presidents. They are more liable to be conscientious, to endorse conventional morality, to identify with their parents’ values and to be obedient to parental authority. They achieve more in their careers, having done better at school, with parents pitching dinner-table conversation at their level rather than that of younger siblings. They are more anxious about their status, more emotionally intense, less quick to recover from upsets. They are more vengeful and prone to anger. They do not usually enjoy risk-taking in general and dangerous sports in particular, preferring swimming, tennis, golf and other non-contact sports. They tend not