Colman Noctor: Does birth order shape your personality?  

Regardless of where a child is placed in the family, the quality of relationship with the parents has the most formative influence over their future 

Many positive traits can be observed according to our position in the order of birth. Picture: iStock 

Stereotypes like ‘typical oldest child’, ‘middle-child syndrome’, ‘spoilt baby of the family’ tend to sound like pop-psychology generalisations. But there is a degree of wisdom behind these generic descriptions. 

In the early 20th-century, Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler suspected that birth order leads to differences in siblings. Through research, he discovered a trend that firstborns tended to be neurotic, which he suggested arose after they were dethroned when another sibling came along.