Good Parenting

It’s official!

Middle children DO get neglected according a recent survey of 1,000 parents and 1,000 middle children.

A third of these parents with three children admitted that they tended to leave their children out. Their children agreed with them, saying they received less attention than their older or younger siblings.

And half the children surveyed said they felt less ‘mothered’ than their siblings. For instance, more than a third were left alone to do their homework.

Before you start thinking how terrible life must be for middle children, just hold on a minute…

The kids surveyed believed that they grew up more quickly and learnt more because they were left to fend for themselves.  They actually benefited from their parents standing back and giving them some space to develop their own resourcefulness.

I’ve always believed that middle children are more resilient and mentally tougher than any other position. This is partly due to the fact that not everything comes easy to a middle child.

More than children in any other birth order position middles must draw on their own resources and develop their own resourcefulness.

Anyone who has followed my work knows that I am a firm believer in the notion of benign neglect when it comes to raising kids. That means that parents should stand back and allow kids to develop independence and develop their own way of resolving problems.

Parenting is always a battle between providing kids space to develop their own resourcefulness and opportunities to develop strong relationships. In small families space is difficult, but relationships are easy if you are cunning enough and willing to organise some one-on-one time with kids.

The challenge is different in large families.

It’s easy to give kids space but opportunities to build parent-child relationships are more difficult to come by.

Similarly, it seems that middle children tend to be given more space by parents than other children to develop their own resourcefulness, however the opportunities for relationships are fewer as less parent time is available to them.

This research is fascinating.

Middles maybe left out, but in many ways, that is to their advantage. Being forced to stand on their own two feet from an early age has a positive effect on many middle children in terms of learning, independence and ability to form peer relationships.

The challenge for parents is to apply similar amounts of benign parental neglect to first born and youngest children as we obviously do with middle children.