Calling all middle children: You have some of the best traits!

Middle children unite! We’re the glue that keeps our siblings together, so we deserve all the recognition we can get – we’re rather wonderful really.

We’re creative, peacemakers and generally quite successful (and why wouldn’t we be?), as we’re some of the most independent people out there! Find out why middle child is a great position to be in – even if it doesn’t always feel like it!

We’re starting to become rare!

The traditional family is shrinking year on year these days. Last century, large families were common, so there were plenty of middle children to go around. Nowadays however, the average one family 1.95 children – roughly two kid families. That means, there’s an eldest and a youngest, but none of us in between to smooth things over! So we’re gradually being phased out which means we’re becoming rare – and precious!

We’re good at compromise

Because we had to be! Being literally in the middle of any disputes between siblings, we’re well-versed in the art of brokering peace and finding the ‘fair’ option. Middle children are therefore obsessed with fairness and equality as a result, making them capable of being the go-between that can bring everyone to an agreement. These kinds of diplomatic traits make us leaders – which is maybe why half of U.S. presidents were middle children, from JFK and George Washington to Abraham Lincoln and Eisenhower!

We’re team players

As stated above, we like to have people working together. We actively attempt to solve conflict and making everything run well because we’re motivated by fairness. That striving for fairness means we’ll work hard as part of a team – but we also want everyone else to pull their weight too! According to Katrin Schumann, in her book The Secret Power of Middle Children, we’re super loyal, meaning family and friends come first and we’re very much for our home team.

We’re super loyal – more so than our siblings!

This loyalty to our teams translates into our romantic relationships too. We resolve conflicts with our partners which is they key to long marriages, along with our ability to compromise to accommodate our spouse’s wishes alongside our own.

Dr. Catherine Salmon, a birth-order research published a study that showed that middle children are significantly less likely than others to cheat in long-term romantic relationships, with 80 percent saying they never strayed, compared to 65 percent of firstborns, and 53 percent of last-borns. So if you’re looking for something long-term and committed, stick with us!

We do our own thing

The middle child syndrome theory is widely disputed, but there’s no smoke without flame – we apparently do sometimes receive less attention than our older and younger counterparts, according to a survey from TheBabyWebsite.com! A survey of 1,000 parents and 1,000 middle children found that 1/3 of parents admitted that their second child tends to get left out.

However, this is not necessarily a bad thing! It just means we had more time to do our own things and discover our own interests! As a result, we tend to be more creative and independent, happy in our own company – go us!