Word: birthed
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...might want to adopt.' MILLA JOVOVICH, actress and model, joking about how she gained 65 lbs. (about 30 kg) during the first four months of her first pregnancy. She is due to give birth in November...
...holes in the theoriesThe birth-order effect, for all its seeming robustness, is not indestructible. There's a lot that can throw it out of balance-particularly family dysfunction. In a 2005 study, investigators at the University of Birmingham in Britain examined the case histories of 400 abused children and the 795 siblings of those so-called index kids. In general, they found that when only one child in the family was abused, the scapegoat was usually the eldest. When a younger child was abused, some or all of the other kids usually were as well. Mistreatment...
...sheer number of siblings in a family can also trump birth order. The 1% income difference that Black detected from child to child tends to flatten out as you move down the age line, with a smaller earnings gap between a third and fourth child than between a second and third. The IQ-boosting power of tutoring, meanwhile, may actually have less influence in small families, with parents of just two or three kids doing most of the teaching, than in the six- or eight-child family, in which the eldest sibs have to pitch in more. Since the Norwegian...
...most vocal detractors of birth-order research question less the findings of the science than the methods. To achieve any kind of statistical significance, investigators must assemble large samples of families and look for patterns among them. But families are very different things-distinguished by size, income, hometown, education, religion, ethnicity and more. Throw enough random factors like those into the mix, and the results you get may be nothing more than interesting junk...
...Ultimately, of course, the birth-order debate will never be entirely settled. Family studies and the statistics they yield are cold and precise things, parsing human behavior down to decimal points and margins of error. But families are a good deal sloppier than that, a mishmash of competing needs and moods and clashing emotions, better understood by the people in the thick of them than by anyone standing outside. Yet millenniums of families would swear by the power of birth order to shape the adults we eventually become. Science may yet overturn the whole theory, but for now, the smart...