The Oldest Child Gets The Most Space In The Family Photo Album
Pictures are an excellent way to capture a family’s life and traditions, and they have been a medium for communicating these things since the camera was first introduced. Initially, pictures were more of a luxury, but since the camera became widely available, they have become a way of documenting almost every part of family life from weddings to camping trips.
Photos have also become a very important way of documenting childhood, and parents jump at the opportunity to take as many pictures of their children as possible. The pictures that parents take of their children over the years create a kind of photographic biography. Yet these biographies can become good fodder for sibling rivalries: not all family photo albums are created equal. Research suggests that oldest children are photographed way more than their younger sibling counterparts.
According to a survey conducted by Nikon, 46% of parents questioned admitted that they had significantly more pictures of their oldest child than the rest of their children. In addition, adding gas to the sibling rivalry fire, 34% of children are aware of the fact that there are more pictures of their older brother or sister. But what accounts for this trend? How can we explain it?
One way of understanding this phenomenon is the birth order theory promoted by many psychologists. This theory maintains that personalities are developed in children based on their order of birth from oldest to youngest (including only children). While this theory is a great generalization, and there are always exceptions to every rule, it is a good way of understanding the reasons why parents and child both behave and parent differently. Let’s take a quick look at the birth order theory to see how we might connect it to the fact that parents often take more photos of their oldest child.
Oldest children and only children are the first apple of their parent’s eye and receive both a lot of attention and a lot of responsibility. They tend to develop high organization skills, perfectionistic tendencies, and strong sense of leadership. They break all the childhood barriers first and get a lot of attention for it.
The second child is often called the lost child because he or she grows up in the oldest child’s shadow. They miss out on a lot of the attention and praise that are lavished in different ways on both the oldest and youngest (or only) children. This often causes the middle child to develop an independent, peacemaking, and slightly secretive personality. Middle children also find more value in building relationships outside the family, in their peer groups for example, than their sibling counterparts.
The youngest child, like the oldest, is social and outgoing but typically lacks the element of responsibility and ambition present in the oldest child. They love to have a good time and have a tendency to be jokers and partiers. They get a lot of doting from their parents, and as a result can have difficulty taking charge of their own lives and maturing into an adult.
From the evidence above, the main reason that oldest children appear more frequently in family pictures is that they do everything for the first time, right when their parents find everything to be new and exciting. The second and third child around, parents aren’t so keen on photographing every spaghetti mess-they have learned to take pictures of the things they hold to be most important. It isn’t that parents deliberately attempt to show the oldest child favoritism in the family photo albums; it just tends to happen that way naturally. Still, this unconscious parental favoritism is another way to keeps sibling rivalry fire hot and burning.
