[strken]

Perhaps it's the result of small families for completely different reasons than you posit.

On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything. On the second child, they've picked up a few specific fears ("What if Alice gets hit in the head while horse-riding like Bob did?") and stopped stressing about the others. On children three and four they've got much more experience and just don't worry about things as much.

With larger families, this attitude would come to be reflected by society as a whole. With smaller families, parents don't make it past the first and second child so often, and they never stop worrying.

[lapcat]

> On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything.

There's no actual empirical evidence for this pop psychological theory, and it's certainly not my experience as a firstborn way back in the day. Moreover, we're not talking about babies, who of course need to be coddled. The issue is with kids who are old enough for unsupervised play, by which time the parents are already experienced, literally 10+ years of parenting experience, and if they have two kids, they've likely had both before one of them is old enough for unsupervised play, at most maybe five years apart.

In fact, parents are more likely to forget than they are to learn. It's not like they've never encountered kids before in their lives. They were kids themselves! They just need to remember what it was like for them as kids. The hardest part is taking care of infants, because you generally don't remember what it was like to be an infant, so infants are somewhat more mysterious than older kids.

[circlefavshape]

It totally was my experience of being a firstborn. My mother went through a stage of insisting I stay in my own garden, which meant I missed out on lots of stuff the other kids were doing. My younger brothers roamed all over the fields that surrounded us (though having said that they were much less likely to do what they were told than I was)

[lapcat]

Garden?

Anyway, I'm not denying your specific experience. It all depends on the time and the place and the parents, and those can all be different. I'm not even denying that firstborns may be treated a little differently than later children. What I am denying is that firstborn risk consciousness can explain a major societal shift in childrearing attitudes. In general, firstborn children 50 years ago were given much more personal freedom than even later children today, despite the fact that "GenX" was a smaller generation in population with few siblings.

[bombcar]

Garden is a European term used sometimes for "yard" - so mom didn't let him leave the yard, but the younger brothers were allowed to.

We have the English world kindergarten from this.

[strken]

What do you mean there's no evidence? Consider e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1995.76.1.4...:

> children's birth order and family size are consistently related to styles of parenting (i.e., levels of control and levels of warmth) which are known to influence achievement directly (Baumrind, 1767, 1971; Dornbusch, et al., 1987; Paulson, 1994; Steinberg, et al., 1789). For example, firstborn children have rated parents higher on behaviors such as parental control (Schaller, 1978) and parental strictness (Rule, 1991) than later-born children

The pop-science explanation may or may not be true, but the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style has supporting evidence.

[geraldhh]

as @lapcat noted, there is a paywal preventing access to the information you refer to. this is somewhat subpar, pls link open information, quote or idk something

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1995.76.1.43

[strken]

I wasn't going to link directly to a pirate site, even if it's convenient and even though journals are parasites.

[lapcat]

The full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract doesn't seem to say what you're saying. It does say:

1) Kids and parents have differing perceptions of the parenting style: "Birth-order and family-size differences were found in adolescents' achievement and perceptions of parenting style and parental involvement but not in parents' perceptions of parenting." Thus, your statement "the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style" doesn't actually seem to be a fact.

2) Parenting style, whether it actually differed or not among children, didn't seem to explain the differences in archievement: "these parenting characteristics did not mediate the differences seen in achievement by birth order and family size."

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

why would you characterize that as pop psychology?

[lapcat]

Because it's a theory that sounds superficially plausible to laypeople when presented and not given much thought or scrutiny, but there's no actual scientific basis or empirical support for the idea.