There’s a long-standing debate in social science about the importance of “birth order.” We’ve all heard that older and younger siblings tend to have certain personality traits stemming from their childhood family interactions—claims that are, alas, mostly overblown. However, older siblings do score slightly higher on intelligence tests and other academic measures, perhaps thanks to more intensive parenting and nurturing during their early years before additional siblings come along to suck up all the oxygen.
But forget siblings. A new working paper from Kieron Barclay and Dalton Conley claims that even cousins can have a similar effect, possibly by taking up the resources of secondary caregivers such as grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Using data from Sweden on kids born between 1972 and 2003, it finds that coming later in one’s maternal cousin group can reduce a child’s high-school GPA rank by up to 5 percentage points (e.g., being at the 55th percentile instead of the 60th), with an effect for the paternal cousin group a little less than half as big.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Institute for Family Studies
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies