Dalton Conley is concerned with birth order in the family, but only to debunk the old implication of it. In his “The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why,” he argues that socioeconomic forces are the variables that shape individual siblings, more than their pecking order in the family. The primordial pecking order that is experienced in the family will not be the same as the eventual pecking order one will find himself in later on in life. Hence, there is no single factor, hard and fast formula, or secret recipe that one can have to predict success or failure.
What plays out as dynamics in the family setting will play a determinant in one’s fate. However, that person still has the opportunity and capability to change that family pre-determined fate through various factors, all within, of course, the social and economic parameters of his objective reality.
The middle child may be full of woe. Conley said middle children need “time where they’re not being compared, at least in their own heads, to their older, or to their younger siblings. Time where they can get the individual attention from their parents.” He further describes middle children as “25 percent less likely to be sent to a private school than they were before, and they’re five times more likely to be held back a grade.” However, if the middle child’s parent takes extra care of him, he might turn out to be a pleasant surprise beyond expectation.
Conley further asserts that the inequality happens right within the family – and this is the redefinition of pecking order. However, it is the primordial pecking order that a family practices, or what we know as birth order, that further worsens the inequality. This inequality is caused by three factors: love of parents is distributed unequally among children, the size of financial resources that a child may avail of in the family depends on the number of children that the resources have to be divided among (the law of supply and demand), and that children from large families end up less successful than those from smaller families because love and finances were more scarce to inspire, motivate, and support them with.
According to Conley, “The family itself becomes a mass of competing influences when the numbers increase … community conditions, peer influences, and random chance all seem to play a greater role the more siblings there are.” This stresses the point that a person is a product of the social and economic forces that carry him through life, and that childhood is the most crucial time in one’s life.
Conley’s research concludes that socioeconomic status or class is carried on across generations. What is crucial is the parents’ traditional beliefs.
