Nonfiction Book Review: The Firstborn Advantage by Dr. Kevin Leman

Guess who said the following: “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.” No, not me after my last performance evaluation. This quote is from Leonardo da Vinci, who created the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Oh, and was a genius. And was also a functional firstborn. This reveals the paradox of the firstborn personality and how perfectionism is a crippling reality and unavoidable trait for nearly all firstborns. Even highly intelligent and creative ones.

Author Dr. Kevin Leman wrote The Birth Order Book and some might say he is the expert on birth order. He’s certainly written a lot of books about it. He dedicated The Firstborn Advantage: Making Your Birth Order Work For You to his firstborn daughter.

Leman reviews some of the material that he covered in The Birth Order Book and then goes into more detail. One important aspect receives more explanation: the functional firstborn. This is when a person has an older sibling who is a different gender or is older by five or more years. This gap sets up parenting behaviors toward the younger of the two children that are similar to those that actual firstborns experience.

And remember, only children have many of the same qualities as firstborn, so they are also covered in this book.

Perhaps because a lot of what is in The Firstborn Advantage is covered so well in The Birth Order Book, this one is slightly less compelling and has some overlap. But Leman does go into deeper detail on things like:

• Parent/child relationship dynamics and how they influence the firstborn’s personality and development
• Criticism and how harmful it can be to a firstborn
• Traits, strengths, and weaknesses of firstborns
• The many ways a parent’s actions can criticize a child already prone to self-criticism and judgment simply because they are first and because they are the experimental one. Being the child the parents learn on can have unpleasant consequences.
• The interactions of a firstborn parent with their own firstborn, middle born, and later born children

Leman persistently repeats that the negative can be overcome. You don’t have to stay stuck in the patterns that formed your life and the behaviors you learned in response to a very difficult situation. And he gives a lot of direction on how to do this.

Then he goes on to show how you can use your strengths in your home life, at school (for your child and for yourself), and at work. You get solid parenting advice, marital advice, and job advice from an experienced psychologist in this book.

After reading The Birth Order Book and The Eldest Daughter Effect, my interest in birth order was peaked and I decided to learn more, so this book was at the top of my list. It has been an eye opening way to look at myself and my life so far. And being a firstborn, I wanted to find out as much as I could. Because that’s how firtsborns are.

It seems a little judgmental to read a book about middle borns and proceed to analyze all the middle born people I know as I read it. It seems kinder to analyze myself (and other firstborns) first. I’ll read the middle born book – it’s on my TBR list. But I thought I’d turn the lens on myself first. Plus, I can write more about firstborns since “I are one.” (To quote Jeff Foxworthy.)

One of the sections I especially liked in the book is when Leman talks to firstborn parents about their firstborn children. That was/is me – firstborn of two firstborn. He points out, “If you want something done, you call the firstborn,” because the middle child always seems to disappear and the baby is an expert at getting other people to do the work. Then Leman says, “Now, I ask you, is this fair to your firstborn?” This got my attention. Go on.

He goes on. Yes, he says, you go to the store and you tell your firstborn she’s in charge, making her “chief security guard and babysitter. If something goes awry while you’re gone, whose fault is it? The firstborn’s, of course, because you left her in charge.” Yeah that’s how it was, I think as I read.  “I ask you again, is this fair to your firstborn?” Wow. When you put it that way, it seems so obvious.

But it isn’t – and wasn’t. I thought my life was like that because of the age difference between me and the others. But maybe, just maybe, it was due to this tendency of parents to allow the firstborn to do more than her share just because she can. And because parents are overwhelmed. (And yes, it happens to sons, too. But I’m a girl.)

I warmly recommend The Firstborn Advantage. It’s a constructive tool for further study and insight into the topic, full of useful advice for different areas of life. Mostly firstborn and only children will benefit from it but it’s a good idea for parents to read the book as there is solid advice for parenting each birth order.

I still want to read a more in-depth book on birth order in the workplace and maybe there’s one out there, so I’ll keep looking. Until then, The Firstborn Advantage is a helpful expansion of the topics introduced in The Birth Order Book, though it can also be a standalone introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of the firstborn personality with encouragement in developing the strengths and understanding the weaknesses.

Book cover by carynwrites.com
Children playing by Alicja from Pixabay / filtered from original