Exceptionally poor attempt to lie with statistics. Three or more is not an avg of 4 or more, and comparing women in their 40s to all mothers isn't equivalent.<p>There may be something to this, but the math is so intentionally misleading as to murder the credibility of the author.
I’m an oldest child, but my mother was a middle child and growing up loved Jane the Middle Moffat by Eleanor Estes (and all the other Moffat books.) I still think it is a peculiarly good insight into the mind, and the value, of a child with older and younger siblings in a poor family.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Moffat-Eleanor-Estes/dp/0152025294" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Moffat-Eleanor-Estes/dp/015202...</a>
Ha, funny they ask about August 12th. I'll be running a four team friendly tournament for my middle daughter's fast pitch softball team.<p>Three kids here. It's tough, sure. Not for everyone? You can say that too. Rewarding? The most rewarding thing I've yet to experience.<p>As others mentioned, I didn't really plan all these kids out. Life happens, I guess.
It's interesting that the article doesn't have a comment to make about other familial arrangements brought about by shorter marriages and relationships.<p>For example, I'm older than my brothers, yet the oldest of them is not a middle child, because he's not a brother of my other brothers.<p>When families start spreading like this, a kid can be both a middle-child and a firstborn simultaneously - it becomes relative. And the attention that their position supposedly gives them becomes harder to measure.
As nice of a theory it is, birth order has not been shown to affect personality at all.<p>> "Contemporary empirical research shows that birth order does not influence the Big Five personality traits."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order</a><p>The fact that such a big environmental factor doesn't effect personality at all, to me suggests that personality is mostly genetic. Anecdotally, It sure seems like kids have very distinct personalities from a very start.<p>Another anecdote (that personality is more nature rather than nurture), is the stories of identical twins adopted to different families. When reunited as adults, they seem to have the same personality. One such story:<p>> "It's not just our taste in music or books; it goes beyond that. In her, I see the same basic personality. And yet, eventually we had to realize that we're different people with different life histories."<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2007/10/25/15629096/identical-strangers-explore-nature-vs-nurture" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2007/10/25/15629096/identical-strangers-...</a>
I see the number of children a couple has as a vote on how many people should exist on earth. If you have 0 or 1 child as a couple, you are voting that there should be fewer people. If you have 2 children, you're voting that there should be about the same number of people. If you have more than 2 children as a couple, you're voting that there should be more people on earth.<p>With that context, I can clearly see why nobody in a city would want to have more than 2 children.