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The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why by Dalton Conley Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Size Matters Readers will find good sociology presented through fine writing and supported by memorable stories in Dalton Conley’s new book, The Pecking Order. Readers who remember reading about the importance of birth order will find that there’s little correlation between birth order and success. A much more significant factor is the size of the family, when in large families the middle often gets short shrift. Lots of other factors impact success, including gender, weight, economic level, working parents and divorce. Readers who like analysis based on data will enjoy reading The Pecking Order, even when it shatters misconceptions. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5, “Movin’ On Up, Movin’ On Out: Mobility and Sibling Differences,” pp. 96-102: Just as family trauma and downward mobility generate differences in sibling success depending on when it happens in the particular history of a given family, the same is true for positive (and neutral) family transitions such as upward parental career trajectories, remarriage, immigration, and the overall rising tide of the economy and society. It is not so simple, however, that we can say that positive transitions have the opposite impact of family trauma on siblings. True, changes that result in a better climate, more money, and happier parents generally advantage the kids who experience those benefits the longest (i.e., the youngest), but the formula is not so straightforward, as we shall see below. Their impact depends on factors internal to the family—such as gender norms, birth order, and spacing—as well as forces that are external to the household—such as class, race, and nativity. First, I will deal with upward economic mobility. In chapter 3, I mentioned that birth order matters more for socioeconomic reasons than for psychological ones. While the main relevance of birth order is its relation to family size—in that the pie gets sliced into more (and thinner) pieces with the addition of each child— there is a countervailing trend at play as well: the pie often grows in size as the family does. Most families that remain intact experience some upward mobility over their history. This is what sociologists call a “career” effect (referring to the careers of the parents). In fact, from a social engineering viewpoint, family economic trajectories seem poorly designed: A couple decides to start a family together. They probably rent a home for a while before they save up some money for a down payment on a house or apartment. When they first buy a home, they are told to push themselves to the max in terms of what they can afford. The monthly payments on their thirty-year mortgage may seem almost unmanageable. When their child is born, the costs increase; with a baby comes the expense of diapers and another mouth to feed. But, more importantly, if both parents work in today’s society, they face a choice of having one drop out of the labor market (thus losing that income) or hiring a babysitter or seeking out group daycare (since, unlike in most European countries, it is not free here). If they have a second or third child, these costs really pile up. But hopefully one or both parents can manage to hold their act together at the office and will begin to make progress up the career ladder. If all goes well—and the economy does not tank—then the financial pressures should ease up after a few years, largely as the result of two factors. First, while inflation causes some costs to increase, if the family was lucky enough to be one of the two-thirds of American households that owns their home, then their housing costs—which generally take up the largest slice of a household’s budget—will remain more or less fixed. If the family secured a fifteen-year or, more commonly, a thirty-year fixed mortgage, the monthly payments are exactly the same in year thirty as they were in the first year, but, of course, inflation has made that figure seem a lot less daunting. Added to this is the fact that hopefully the parents’ incomes have outpaced the inflation rate. This was certainly the case for the majority of American households in the period between World War II and the Oil Shock of 1973, though since 1973 the record has been more mixed.In recent decades, the upper half of American households have seen their incomes rise with regularity, but the lower half have been stagnant or even lost ground—except during a brief period in the 1990s. In some cases, then, the upward career paths and rising earning power of parents can offset the growth of expenses with the addition of children (and put them in a very nice position when kids start to move out and become independent).For those families who still experience the American dream of upward mobility, the socioeconomic changes to the household can imprint differently on the children by their birth position, particularly when the spacing between children is large, as was the case for Mathilde, Margaret, and Arnold. Mathilde, Margaret, and Arnold’s father was seventeen years older than their mother; the marriage was the second for both parents. But while their mother had been married for only two years when her first husband died in an accident (and she had borne no children with him), their father had been married for approximately fifteen years to a woman named Ada, who had died from typhoid fever in 1930 along with their oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Agnes. Two children survived their mother: eleven-year-old Eleanor and four-year-old Anne. Their father remarried one year later, and the woman he married (Mathilde, Margaret, and Arnold’s mother) was Ada’s niece (somewhat scandalous even in Oklahoma in 1931). A year later, Mathilde was born and, three years after that, Margaret. The four girls always considered themselves “real” sisters, though Eleanor, the only one who could remember Ada, was always somewhat resentful of her stepmother/cousin and felt that her life would have been much better if her own mother had not died. Most available research supports her claim (see chapter 4). Eleanor, who eloped at eighteen, was also much older than the others, and was already married by the time Mathilde and Margaret could first remember her. (She resided nearby, though, and Mathilde and Margaret lived with her and helped her take care of her two children.) Anne, who could not really remember Ada and grew up somewhat uncertain of her place in the family, battled low self-esteem her whole life, and even had a period where she underwent electroshock therapy. Despite this, Mathilde always felt closer to Anne and, in a more maternal sense, Eleanor, than she did to her “full” sister, Margaret. Mathilde and Margaret each grew up feeling resentful of the other—and more than a little competitive— though they grew a little closer as adults. When Mathilde was a senior in high school and Margaret was a freshman, Arnold was born—a happy accident, as the family members report. From the start, everyone loved Arnold and was very proud of him; by all accounts, he was always a “self-starter”: motivated to do well in his studies and be active in the community. Because his parents had wisely invested the capital and assets that had accumulated during his father’s marriage to Ada and had worked to make them grow over the years, the family was also much wealthier during Arnold’s childhood than it had been during the previous children’s, and so he received more material things than Mathilde and Margaret and Anne (and, certainly, Eleanor) had enjoyed. Further, with his sisters out of the house, Arnold was essentially raised as an only child (though there were a number of cousins and other relatives around his age, too). But his position as a (virtual) only child, coupled with the substantially better financial situation his family enjoyed during his youth, benefited him enormously: he could afford to enroll at Harvard when he was accepted there, and this set the stage for remarkable upward mobility. At Harvard, exposed to new ideas and new people, he continued to excel. He then returned home to Oklahoma to attend law school, and has been a successful local and state politician, including several terms as mayor and state senator, ever since. Remarriage The transition from single parenting to (re)marriage often triggers upward economic mobility. Monica and Julia remember their mother as a critical, stern woman who often had angry outbursts. They forgive her, though, since they know it was tough for her as a single mother who was constantly worried about money. Nonetheless, tensions often ran high between the three women in their Denver home. There was a lot of screaming in the household, and both girls suffered from extreme anxiety. While Julia chewed her fingernails down until her fingers appeared to be bloody stumps, her sister manifested even more serious neuroses. When puberty hit, Monica became anorexic, a disorder she attributes to her financial worries about the cost of consuming anything. In the middle of Monica’s sophomore year of high school, their mother moved them to Knoxville, Tennessee, where she had wanted to return ever since she had graduated from the University of Tennessee. This transition seems to have been fairly difficult for Monica, and she reacted by quitting many of the things that she had always been good at—especially drawing and other creative activities. ‘At first I was excited to go,” Monica recalled. “But once we were there, I flipped out. I called my father and told him I wanted to go back and live with him. I remember lying in my room in the dark, listening to Elton John, crying for no particular reason. I spent all my time lying in the dark Though she had always been labeled “the reader” in the family, Monica struggled to find her way after high school: she dropped out of several colleges, had a nervous breakdown at one point, and has relocated around the country several times. Finally, at age thirty-five she has found some stability, working steadily as a hairdresser for the last five years in Minneapolis. Around the same time that Monica turned eighteen and left home for college, their mother remarried—to a wealthy doctor. The family moved to a much better neighborhood, and Julia finished school in the “rich” high school. Best of all, their mother relaxed about money. She quit smoking. She stopped yelling. She got more sleep and was generally more pleasant to be around. So, after three high school years of a more relaxed and wealthy existence, Julia applied to private colleges across the country. “Go to any school you like,” her stepfather told her. Her mother even objected, but he insisted on paying the full tab for her education (an offer that was made to Monica as well, but too late to make a real difference). Four years later, Julia graduated from the University of Southern California with very good grades; like many twenty-somethings (including her own sister), she struggled for direction for a couple years after college. Luckily, she had her stepfather’s wealth as a safety net to fall back on. He paid for a postgraduation trip around the world, a stint as a freelance photographer in Spain, and then financed her move back to the United States to pursue an M.B.A. at the prestigious Thunderbird school of international management. She now works in the marketing department of a Fortune 500 company and is being transferred to Paris to work as an account executive. Of course, life does not always follow the straightforward equation that more money—later in the family’s history—is necessarily better for the younger ones who are around to enjoy it for longer. For example, Donald, Derek, and Charlotte were lucky enough to be born to a father whose prospects were good. He had attended the Naval Academy and married a woman who had been a “Navy brat” herself (that is, her father had been in the Navy, too). The three kids grew up on numerous Navy bases as their father, who worked as an engineer, worked his way up the military ranks. (He finally retired as a rear admiral.) As a result, the first two siblings had a very different upbringing than the last, since the first two were children of a military man without much rank, and Charlotte was a child of a very high-ranking officer—thus, a military “princess.” This turned out to be very relevant to her childhood; over time, she became quite dependent on her father’s rank for status and a sense of identity. The family moved at least once every two years, and sometimes much more frequently than that, so they were all frequently the new kids in school. As is the custom in the military, their father’s rank extended a certain status and renown to them on the military base itself, but their own friendship networks were continually disrupted and thus they never enjoyed a settled or consistent childhood. When Derek—the secondborn boy—started to get into “mischief,” his parents’ scolding was put in terms of how he could hurt his father’s career. By the time Charlotte came into her teenage years, her dad was already so powerful that no one would challenge his authority over a family matter. Donald and Derek were raised in what they called “dress military” (i.e., lower ranks), living in the barracks (albeit the officers’ quarters) on base while much of Charlotte’s childhood was “upper military.” At one posting, the family lived in a mansion on a hill over the base. A little later, when they were stationed in Italy, they enjoyed the luxury of private drivers and a service staff in their home. But the biggest perks were not material; they were the inherent status that accrued from being the child of one of the highest-ranking officers on base. Sadly, in Charlotte’s case, all this privilege backfired. It made her less independent. Now Charlotte finds herself with three children to raise on her husband’s rather modest income as a struggling restaurateur. A would-be entrepreneur who had impressed her with big talk of the glamorous life, her husband didn’t bank on the difficulty of getting a restaurant off the ground, and the couple’s finances are now virtually devastated. She has been diagnosed as clinically depressed. She never attempted to develop a career of her own—having always anticipated being taken care of by men in the manner to which she had grown accustomed. She now regrets this life choice—or lack thereof—but she does not know what she can do to better her situation. Perhaps all the maid service she enjoyed growing up contributed to a sense of “learned helplessness.” Dalton’s key premise is that family resources (time, attention, money) are disproportionately allocated toward different siblings, and the consequences have a huge impact on the ultimate success of the siblings. The Pecking Order presents fascinating stories and an opportunity to discuss our families of origin in new ways, especially with greater understanding that none of us were raised equally. Steve Hopkins, April 23, 2004
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