Science Says Oldest Siblings Are The Smartest

Sorry, second-borns, it seems your older siblings have an advantage in the smarts department. A recent study in the Journal of Human Resources claims first-born children are smarter than their siblings — and that parents are to blame. The study looked at more than 11,000 children who have completed surveys every few years since 1986 and found that the eldest scored better on cognitive tests starting as early as a year old. Researchers theorize this could be because parents tend to focus more on first-born children in the years before their siblings are born and worry less about younger children once they feel they have parenting down. "Mothers take more risks during pregnancy and are less likely to breast-feed and to provide cognitive stimulation for latter-born children," the researchers said in an abstract. As a middle child, I have to call bull. My older brother once baked a toothpick inside brownies because "the box said to stick a toothpick in to see if they were done." We really can't know from just one study whether or not birth order makes a difference in intelligence, anyway. A 2015 study in the Journal of Research in Personality found differences in intelligence based on birth order to be negligible. So, younger siblings, take this study with a grain of salt. After all, you know who's the smartest kid.