[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."