ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 15, 1996 TAG: 9610150094
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
"LATERBORNS," rise up and rebel! It is your destiny!
This is the theory, at least, developed by a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who for 26 years has been studying the lives and looking at the birth orders of 6,566 historical figures to see what, if any, correlation there is between the two.
Frank J. Sulloway's conclusion: Birth order is the most important factor in how a personality develops. Further, he argues in his book, "Born to Rebel", most rebels throughout history are laterborn children, willing to challenge the existing order while firstborns struggle to maintain it.
At last, here is an historical niche that laterborns can claim for their own. Firstborns, it has long been suggested, are inclined to be more assertive, more ambitious. They tend to dominate. They are leaders: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Hillary Clinton.
And what of younger siblings? If the eldest is the natural leader, are they destined by the order of their birth to be sheep, going placidly where more dominant personalities would have them go? Is this how kids behave in most families? Hardly.
Children born later scramble to make their own mark, find their own way to win parental attention.
In doing so, Sulloway's theory suggests, they become the revolutionaries in the human story, daring to doubt the conventional wisdom, challenge the accepted order, think in new ways: Nicholas Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Harriet Tubman - all are laterborn children.
The theory has its critics. There are social scientists who question Sulloway's research methods. There are exceptions who defy his birth-order breakdown. (Albert Einstein, for example, was a firstborn.) But for laterborns, accustomed to reading ad nauseam about the leadership abilities of eldest children, it shouldn't matter much if the "revolutionary personality" theory gains wide acceptance.
It is an intellectual "Molotov cocktail" thrown in the midst of accepted thinking about individual development, creating a niche they can claim for their own. How satisfying.
LENGTH: Short : 44 linesby CNB