If you think your parents let your younger siblings get
away with a lot, you're probably right. A
new study from researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere
concludes that parents do punish older
children more harshly — and what's more, that they
are wise to do so.
Published in the April issue of Economic
Journal, the study — titled "Games Parents and
Adolescents Play" — finds evidence that parents are
more likely to withdraw financial support from
older siblings who either drop out of high school —
or in the case of girls, become pregnant — than from
their younger brothers and sisters who find themselves in
the same situations.
Furthermore, the paper presents evidence that more
severe discipline of older children is smart
because it actually deters younger siblings from engaging
in the activities that caused their older
brothers and sisters to be punished in the first place.
"Parents often worry about how forceful of a stand to
take in response to their older children's
behavior," said study co-author Lingxin Hao, a professor of
sociology in the
Krieger School of Arts and
Sciences and the youngest of three sisters, as well as the
mother of a daughter. "Our study finds that
some parents are successfully using this strategy of
influencing their younger children by stopping
their older children's risky behavior."
The study is co-authored by V. Joseph Hotz, an
economics professor at Duke University, and
Ginger Z. Jin, an assistant economics professor at
University of Maryland. It was supported by a grant
from the National Institute for Child Health and Human
Development.
"My older sister always complains that she never got
away with anything when she was growing
up, and we all agree that my youngest sister got away with
murder," said Hotz, who was the middle
child of five siblings and is now the parent of two grown
children. "That's the story of this study."
The researchers began by constructing a model of
parent-teenager interactions using the logic
and mathematical tools provided by game theory. The model
assumes that parents want their
adolescent children to avoid long-term negative
consequences that can result from risky behaviors
such as drinking, drug use, sexual activity and dropping
out of school. Teenagers, on the other hand,
are assumed to value the short-term thrills of risk-taking
behavior while also wanting to avoid
punishment.
In the model, the authors posit that parents need to
establish a reputation among their
children for following through on threatened punishments.
Parents also need to recognize that this
reputation can become diluted if parents do not punish
their children after threatening that they will.
According to the authors' theory, parents have an
incentive to punish their first-born child if
that child engages in risky behaviors in order to
discourage such behavior by younger siblings. This
usually works with first-born children, who recognize that
their parents are likely to be tougher on
their transgressions and, as a result, are deterred in
their rebellions. However, this deterrence
motive for parents seems to wane as their younger children
reach adolescence and parents lose the
energy and motivation to follow through with their
threatened punishments.
"Tender-hearted parents find it harder and harder to
engage in 'tough love' since, as they have
fewer young children in the house, they have less incentive
to uphold reputations as disciplinarians,"
said Jin, herself an older sister and a parent of two. "As
a result, the theory predicts that last-born,
and only, children, knowing that they can get away with
much more than their older brothers and
sisters, are, on average, more likely to engage in risky
behaviors."
To test their model, the researchers looked for
evidence of differential treatment of
adolescent risk-taking by birth order in survey data from
the National Longitudinal Study of Youth,
provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They found
two measures of adolescent rebellion and
two measures of parental punishment. Dropping out of high
school and becoming pregnant were
interpreted as rebellion; not allowing a teenager to live
in the family house and not financially
supporting a teenager were interpreted as punishment.
(Providing financial support was defined as
parents paying half or more of a child's living
expenses.)
The results of the researchers' analysis of the NLSY
data were consistent with their model.
The analysis revealed that first-born children who dropped
out of high school or became pregnant
were less likely to be living at home or receiving
financial support from parents than younger siblings
in the same situations. Moreover, as predicted, younger
siblings were more likely to engage in these
behaviors, especially dropping out of school, than their
older siblings.
The study is available online at
tinyurl.com/5guppr.