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Susan Averett, a mother of two children spaced five years apart, explained to a roomful of alumni Saturday afternoon how she learned that her spacing choice may not have been the best for her younger child.
Averett, Lafayette’s Dana Professor and head of economics and business, told Reunion Weekend participants that several books, most notably Dalton Conley’s The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why,prompted her to conduct research on the economic consequences of birth order.
Her work, “Birth Order and Risky Adolescent Behavior,” co-authored by Laura M. Argys and Daniel I. Rees, both of the University of Colorado at Denver, was published in the April 2006 edition of the journal Economic Inquiry and garnered national attention, including articles in USA Today and the Boston Globe and an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show.
Averett said Conley interviewed hundreds of siblings to determine “which siblings succeed and why” and determined that “there’s a lot of inequality within families.”
Most famous in such unequal pairings, Averett said, are American presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and their younger brothers, Roger and Billy – extreme examples of law-abiding, successful older siblings and risk-taking younger siblings.
Averett also pointed to Why Firstborns Rule the World and Lastborns Want to Change It by Michael Glose as important to her research. And, in a bid to popular culture, she cited the “Brady Bunch effect,” using TV sitcom character Jan Brady’s angry outburst about her older sister’s achievements (“Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!”) to describe the difficulties of middle children in large families.
“Only very recently have economists begun to look at how birth order factors into risky behavior,” Averett said.
Her research focused on cigarette smoking, alcohol and marijuana use, and sexual activities as examples of risky behavior by adolescents.
“If adolescents engage in these behaviors, they may have negative effects on their future earning capacity,” she said, explaining that over the past 20 years, economists have branched out into examining “all kinds of different behaviors, including marriage, fertility, and risk-taking.”
“There are in fact costs to our society” when adolescents engage in risky behavior, Averett said. “And there are, of course, costs to their families.”
Averett said that with the help of student researchers in Lafayette’s EXCEL Scholars program, she examined data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics-funded National Longitudinal Study of Youth and Young Adults, encompassing information from 15,000 adolescents, and the National Institutes of Health-funded Adolescent Health Survey, including “very personal” information from about 20,000 adolescents.
Averett and her students learned that boys and girls with older siblings all were more likely to engage in risky behaviors. Boys with older siblings had greater increases in instances of drinking alcohol, using marijuana, and engaging in sexual activity than did girls, while girls had the larger boost in smoking cigarettes.
“We controlled for all other factors,” Averett said, explaining that birth order emerged as the determining factor—and, much to her chagrin, the strongest effects were between siblings four or more years apart.
She also researched the relationship between birth order and positive behavior without finding a link of cause and effect.