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Who's Smart Now?Emily Bazelon takes readers' questions on the purported IQ advantage of firstborn siblings.

Posted Thursday, June 28, 2007, at 4:03 PM ET

Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, June 28, to discuss the research into birth order and intelligence. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Emily Bazelon: That's a lovely way to look at it, and I'm sure us oldests wish all wish that our younger sibs would say the same thing. Though I fear mine might not!

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Southern Maryland: I don't believe in astrology and birth order. My youngest sibling is the electrical engineer, so how did that happen? For both of my parents (who come from large families) the youngest two children went to college. Financially supporting the family and money were the issue, not intelligence. One of my favorite saying is that preparation plus opportunity equals luck.

Emily Bazelon: Your parents' experience is typical, accding to the research. In big families, say 7 or 8 kids, it's the youngest ones who tend to get to go to college, probably bec the family is more financially secure by the time they come along. Here's my own anecdote: My grandfather was the youngest of nine. He was the only one of them who went to college.

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Washington: I would think the results of the birth order study would be hard to generalize because the subjects were all male.

Emily Bazelon: So then the question is, what about younger and older sisters is different from younger and older brothers? You could imagine some obvious differences in a study about risk-taking (which is one area in which older siblings DO matter—you can check out this Slate piece about that if you want http://www.slate.com/id/2141628/). Older brothers might be more likely to take younger brothers out drinking, maybe, since adolescent boys in general tend to act out more. I'm not sure I get how the difference btwn brothers and sisters would matter for IQ scores, though.

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Only children?: Does the study say anything about only children? We have most of the same benefits as first-borns, except with even more undivided attention and without the experience of "teaching" younger siblings. I'm curious as to how that shakes out in studies like this.

Emily Bazelon: This study was all about siblings, so I'm not seeing any only child findings.

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Silver Spring, Md., Mom:... No maybe about it. She would not have qualified for Gifted and Talented in the state of Florida if she has scored 3 points below the required score of 130 on her IQ test, even though I presented them with a Maryland State assessment that said she, as a sixth-grader, was reading at a 12th-grade level and doing math at an eighth-grade level.

Educators get very wrapped up in scores, and labels and in profiling. My daughter is bright, articulate, African American, and I have had to be her biggest champion in proving that she has the legitimate intelligence to back up her high IQ score. My advice: Play the game and stay up on everything related to your children, but let your kids know that it's just part of the game.

Emily Bazelon: That is both good advice and also such a hard double role to play, or at least I find it to be that way. Kids are so smart and perceptive; mine can tell I think when I really care about something, even when I'm trying to downplay it.

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Washington: Although older siblings get more parental attention when they are younger, younger siblings get more attention when they are older. That was clearly the case with me as my four older siblings left home. If environment influences IQ, wouldn't that have an impact? Or would you say that IQ is developed in early childhood?

Emily Bazelon: IQ is somewhat plastic—it can change over time. So if the parental attention is really the determining factor, then you'd expect some bump later. Butagain I'm skeptical that it's so simple; it seems much more likely to me that lots of different factors influence how our brains develop.

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Bethesda, Md.: I think there's a danger (mostly academic) to some non-firstborns in this study, much like the one girls still face in many schools when it comes to math and sciences. Younger siblings now can dismiss any slight midunderstanding they have in school as deficiency in intelligence because of their birth order, which they can't control. Or teachers could dismiss younger siblings as inferior to their older sisters/brothers. Don't you think this study might do more harm than good? Also: Any information on sibling intelligence/IQ scores when the older & second-oldest siblings are of different genders? How about only children?

Emily Bazelon: well I hope the results aren't taken so seriously and literally, because just as with affirmative action, it's wrong to assume that the kid standing in front of you embodies the averages that are out there. She's her own person, and she's got nothing to do with the generalizations about the group she's part of.

This only children question seems like a huge one—I am goign to have to write a separate piece about it!

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Emily Bazelon: Thanks, everyone, that was great fun, and my thanks to you for your thought provoking and excellent questions.

All best,
Emily

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Emily Bazelon edits Slate's health and law columns and writes about law and family. She previously worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

While I'm prepared to accept there's a possibility that secondary children may come into a more intellectually impoverished environment & may not have the same resources to draw upon, framing it in terms of IQ is altogether more problematic (if not actually doing more harm than good).

It comes down to the inherent inaccuracy & usefulness of the test. What they substantially deal with is the ability to retain & organize data & not much else. This describes a great deal of what computers do. Cleverness, wisdom & most especially the creativity required to achieve these qualities are very poorly measured, if at all. Same for curiosity & intuition & probably much else. You get the point.

There's a lot of agreement on this but some "experts" still have problems not quantifying things with this test. The history of the IQ test drills this home. I remember reading a beautifully researched article in The Atlantic magazine explaining that the inventor of the test was much lauded for it as it was enthusiastically adopted everywhere. After a period of time, he could see it was being misused to categorize people inappropriately & said so - decades before this became common knowledge.

The various powers that be unanimously ignored him because they loved the bureaucratic possibilities it represented. In time the problems were acknowledged & numerous "fixes" put in place but the test although much diminished in stature is still cited by some hangers on who have no other ideas on how to make the intangible tangible.

The press needs to educate the public more often & deeply that curiosity & creativity are the foundation of intelligence. The latter the only quality that ensures genius (the ability to be visionary by making leaps, sometimes called lateral thinking). IQ tests as stated, are extremely poor at measuring this.

--john1

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