A new study has revealed that firstborns do well in school more than their younger siblings due to their upbringing and not because of biology, which was previously believed to be the reason as to why the oldest sibling got higher marks in school.
The study was presented at the Royal Economic Society's annual conference in Brighton. Although it might seem very much far out from the previous belief, the survey and the papers of the study say otherwise.
Despite firstborns having poorer health out of all the children in the family, the upbringing of the parents matter more on how the parents are involved more on the firstborn's education. "The firstborns' health disadvantage stands in stark contrast to their educational achievement later in life. Firstborns perform better in school than their younger siblings - and the achievement gap increases when accounting for differences in health at birth," researchers Ramona Molitor and Anne Ardila Brenøe said.
Research has found that the health of firstborns were likely weaker than the later-born siblings, wherein the first-born's normal weight is five percent lower than that of the later-born siblings, as well as being 1 percent shorter than the other siblings. More health deficits have also been found in first-borns, with them having smaller heads, roughly a difference of 0.4 to 0.7 centimeters in measurement. The study also revealed that later-born children were 55 to 73 percent less likely to be born premature.
"Researchers had not looked at health but had suggested firstborns were doing better in school because of biology. We have proven for the first time it isn't to do with biology," Brenøe, one of the researchers, said. "Therefore, if it's not due to health, then it must be down to something that happens after birth. For instance, children's interactions with their parents and how much quality time they spend with their children."
The study analyzed over a million children in Denmark over a 30-year period, which ran from 1981 to 2010.
