Parents are toughter on first children.
Parents Really Are Harder on First Children
A blog about business and economics.
Oct. 21 2013 11:58 AM

Parents Really Are Harder on First Children

If you're an older sibling, then you've probably had conversations with other older siblings about how much tougher parents were on you than on your younger brothers or sisters. If you've gotten older and developed a more mature perspective, you might even have come to appreciate the idea of the sterner discipline to which you were subjected. Economists Joseph Hotz and Juan Pantano have a paper out this fall called "Strategic Parenting, Birth Order and School Performance" that both empirically confirms that parents are tougher on older children and tries to explain it in a strategic context:


Think about it this way. As a parent, punishing your kids has both costs and benefits. But while the cost of punishing your firstborn is basically the same as the cost of punishing a younger child (it's a hassle) the benefits of punishing your firstborn are higher because punishing the older kids has a spillover impact on the younger ones. So it makes sense to invest more in punishing the older child. But since the spillovers are not as strong as the direct effect, this means that older kids are both judged more harshly and do better in school.


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