My wife and I always described our child raising theory as benign neglect. For example, we never spent any time monitoring their homework. And irritated at least one teacher who wanted the homework signed and my wife would sign it Mickey Mouse or Fidel Castro or whatever. They are all three happy, successful grownups with wonderful spouses and families of their own. I suppose we were lucky in that this parenting method worked for them.
My daughter is very easy to parent and requires little oversight. Had I just had her, I would have considered myself a damn good parent.
Her younger brother is good, but just requires a completely different approach and has also had a much more difficult time handling his emotions. Had he been my only child, I would have really thought I was really a mediocre dad.
I’ll eat a pancake. Hell, if I’m hungry enough I might even eat a burnt pancake if there’s enough syrup around. But that’s where I draw the line.
I know, right? The thing I noticed as a kid was my parents didn’t learn from their mistakes. They kept doing the same ineffective thing and expecting a different result. They would make a bad decision and then stick by it regardless of facts or evidence. Some of these decisions turned out to be colossal mistakes that affect my life to this day, and they were completely avoidable and predictable screwups.
I sometimes think that maybe the Soviets and other authoritative societies have the right idea, at least if the State is everyone’s parent, it can (in principle) at least give everyone an equal chance instead of saddling most kids with incompetent parents.
YEP!
Kids are different and respond differently to stimuli. And they then have different experiences even in the same home - your eldest gets to kindergarten and falls in to a set of high achieving kids and parents who all play sports and think good grades are important, and your middle one falls in with a set whose parents are just trying to hold it together and don’t have time to help with homework - who get to watch endless TV. The eldest then ends up with a string of teachers that really believe in them and are great teachers, and the middle one ends up with a string of teachers that are one foot out the door to retirement or can’t manage a classroom. The youngest comes along and is a loner who peer pressure doesn’t impact and self learns from books. Grandma dies or you divorce at a point where the oldest has the emotional capacity to deal, the middle one isn’t mature enough to process and the experience is really traumatic, and the youngest is fairly oblivious. If you hold your parenting steady for all three of these individuals, you’ll fail as a parent - and get three very different results. If you adjust, you will be a good parent - and you’ll still get three very different results.
my guess would be that while a first born child has to suffer his parents’ inexperience, he or she also has the advantage of being an only child for the first several years of life. So, it all balances out.
There is extensive evidence in modern neuroscience that the key component to emotional resilience and regulation of affect is early childhood attachment, particularly in the first 12 to 18 month range. Children who develop good attachment and do not suffer any other underlying cognitive or affective disorders (autistic spetrum, schizoaffective, natal or traumatic brain injury) will generally grow up emotionally healthy regardless of other circumstances including non-parental abuse or other trauma and will seek relationships that reinforce emotional health and social connections even in adverse circumstances. Children who do not develop a good early childhood attachment will almost inevitably have difficulties with emotional dysregulation, forming healthy adolescent and adult relationships, and general self-care regardless of other influences.
There is little evidence to suggest that general personality traits (e.g. introversion verses extroversion or inclination to academic performance versus social or athletic) have much to do with “parenting style” other than exposure to and example by parents will reinforce those interests. It is easy to see how second and subsequent children may develop less secure attachment by virtue of having to share attention of parents, particularly in a single parent household or one that does not have a social-familial network to help to support the mother.
Stranger
Conversely, it is also easy to see how in families in which one or both parents are emotionally neglectful but the older children or a different adult take up the slack, the younger children can end up better off: their healthy parental attachment was to the person doing the parenting job, not to the one with the parenting job title. I suspect it may be more difficult to investigate than the healthier families, though: thankfully there’s more healthy families than not (the bad ones are more visible because they simply happen to make for more interesting stories).
I’m the oldest of multiple siblings and the only one who graduated university and did not have to move back home with our parents. I also didn’t get arrested and go on trial, didn’t hit up my parents for thousands of dollars to pay off criminals, and I’m not going to die from being morbidly obese.
But you know, I work a desk job instead of doing manual labour, so I’m not that successful 
This second kid felt the difference when kid 3 arrived.
There’s the tendency by some people (like my mother) to regard the first pancake as a template for all future pancakes, with any differences being a) flaws, and b) evidently not the responsibility of the cook, because the first pancake didn’t do that. Even if the temperature and batter had changed…