First Children Are Smarter, but Why? (2013) | Hacker News Reader

First Children Are Smarter, but Why? (2013)

theatlantic.com

38 pointsmhb21 comments

A plausible explanation I haven't seen suggested in this article is: lack of surprise.

This is slightly different than the divided-attention and lazy-parent theories.

There is evidence we learn more when we get answers wrong, not right. It's reasonable to assume then the more children you have the more right answers you eventually have as parent. And the same goes for a first child. You are both surprised when something goes wrong and you both learn from it.

The problem is, the parent doesn't necessarily need to be learning more as they have more children, so they take the shortcut of not letting younger children get answers wrong. They don't let them get surprised. Parents don't give younger children as many chances to screw up.

interesting. this would also imply that orphans grow up even smarter.

That's a strange result and an even stranger study: most parents do not have 4 children. Is this perhaps skewed by only childs, since those definitely get most attention by parents and are thus likely to perform a little better than average?

In my case (I have a sister) the outcome was different too, I was a much better student.

If the raw data were available, it would be interesting to recalculate the statistics (something like last, last-1, last-2, last-3) and see if the last children is the smarter too.

You are probably right. One would hope that comparisons of children 1-4 are done on a sample of 4-child families only. Including single child families or 10-chile families obviously skews the attention parameter, not to mention it touches other factors such as the effect on parents' education on family size.

Even more simple then that theory. Number of children is inversely correlated with things like income, IQ, and education level. If they are not only looking at 4 children household, the data will be skewed.

This article shows that mothers consider their firstborn children to do better in school - nothing less, nothing more. The fact that 90% of kids were rated above average says a lot about the validity of the conclusions.

If these results are only "evaluation by mother" then it is impossible to distinguish actual effects from parents' perception.

Misleading title. Doing better in school isn't the same as being smarter.

While I completely agree with you, today's society puts a lot of faith in said model.

Example, and I'm sure a lot of people can attest to this: In high school, I know someone who had a 4.0, took honors classes, but her standardized test scores were garbage in comparison (23 on ACT after 6 months of paid prep.)

Is she a bad test taker? No, she's not, hence why she had a 4.0. But when she's challenged and cannot slave away at her desk at home for 8 hours a day after school, well, yeah.

It's not even that though... It's the child's mother's _perception_ of how they do in school.

I disagree. The internet is full of people who are supposedly really smart but didn't do well in school because they were bored or whatever the excuse of the day is. More often than not, these people are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

There is evidence for birth-order influence of a fetus' genetic development. [1] When a mother has a male child, subsequent male children may not receive the same developmental antibody responses.

The time we spend gestating has a huge effect on our development and is completely independent of the "momentary genetic dice roll" that happened immediately previous.

[1] Sources referenced in the index of Matt Ridley's 1999 book "Genome": Vines, G (1997). Where did you get your brains? _New Scientist_, 3 May 1997: 34-9; Lefebvre, L., Viville, S., Barton, S. C., Ishino, F., Keverne, E. B. and Surani, M. A. (1998). Abnormal maternal behaviour and growth retardation associated with loss of the imprinted gene Mest. _Nature Genetics_ 20: 163-9.

Is this entire article based on the datapoint that asks mothers to evaluate their children's relative academic performance? Because that data proves its own lack of validity when at most 12% of moms rate one of their kids in the bottom half of their class.

Well, while it's not, or perhaps is just about as rigorous, a friend and I went through a large set of incoming MIT student folders one year looking for ones we wanted to advise (before they choose a major it's any credible volunteer in the Institute, mine was a random Dean for Student Affairs who's now the Chaplain), and they were overwhelmingly first born or single children.

For that matter, I'm the eldest of 4, although I'm sufficiently genetically distinct (phenotypically very close to my father) that that's undoubtedly the greats part of why I ended up the smartest by a lot and got into MIT.

I attended MIT, and I can't recall ever telling the Institute that I was a first-born (of 3). What was the source of the data you had on incoming frosh?

Their admissions folders, MIT doesn't have much to speak of more than that prior to matriculation. This would have been for the academic year 1988-9 I think; I don't remember how we came to this conclusion, just that it was self-evident.

Hmmm, for that matter, as a member of the class of '83, I too don't remember explicitly telling them that....

Or maybe I'm misremembering this, it was a quarter century ago; my friend interacted with a large fraction of the undergraduates (EECS) and would through that have gotten a rough but good picture of this sort of thing over the years. But I'm pretty sure I remember us going through some paper files and coming to this conclusion.

Title needs "[2013]" added. This article (and its discussion) is over a year old.

Downvoted for truthspeaking. Awesome.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201206/eternal-curve... suggest it's due to omega 3 fats

Anecdote for sure, but I am the last of the six children and did the best in school.

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