Parents and parents-to-be: you'll find this an invaluable guide to preparing for the rivalries your children will be thrown into willy-nilly (just as you were), and to understanding the favoritism you may find yourself feeling toward one or another of your offspring. First Child, Second Child will also help put those puzzling little questions about child development into a broader perspective. Why did Sue make so many friends at a much earlier age than her older and younger sibs? Why does Jimmy never finish anything? Is Pam's mania for privacy an advantage or a disadvantage? Will quiet little Max be overly shy because his little sister talks a blue streak? The clues are here in this most informative and entertaining look at "the birth-order zodiac," our unchosen yet all-important native environment.

Key insights into birth order help readers understand themselves and improve their marriage, parenting, and career skills.

By a child-care authority and mother of an only child, this useful, knowledgeable book provides sound advice on creating an enriching environment that's stimulating and enjoyable for only children and their parents alike.

Birth order has a powerful effect on children's emotional development, on their self-esteem, and on their sense of well-being. The youngest child, the firstborn, the middleborn, twins, and the only child all have specific birth order issues that, if not atted to early on, can impair their functioning and their interpersonal relations at home and at school, and can follow them into adulthood. Parental birth order, too, plays an important role, as do such other factors as gender and family size. To understand these birth order blues, the author, an expert in parent-child relationships, first raises parents' awareness of the impact of birth order upon children. She then shows how to identify their children's birth order problems, often disguised by behaviors such as underachievement or aggression, and suggests how they can resolve these issues and prevent negative behavioral patterns from developing.

Why do people raised in the same families often differ more dramatically in personality than those from different families? What made Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire uniquely suited to challenge the conventional wisdom of their times? This pioneering inquiry into the significance of birth order answers both these questions with a conceptional boldness that has made critics compare it with the work of Freud and of Darwin himself. During Frank Sulloway's 20-year-research, he combed through thousands of lives in politics, science and religion, demonstrating that first-born children are more likely to identify with authority whereas their younger siblings are predisposed to rise against it. Family dynamics, Sulloway concludes, is a primary engine of historical change. Elegantly written, masterfully researched, BORN TO REBEL is a grand achievement that has galvanised historians and social scientists and will fascinate anyone who has ever pondered the enigma of human character.

This study appears at a time when a decisive turn is due in the research on personality development. After many years of stagna tion and misguided research in this field, this book should lead to a thorough revision and a better understanding of current views on the factors which have an influence on personality. Let us consider the unsatisfactory aspects of the recent develop ments in personality studies. At the beginning of this century, the revolutionary insight gained ground that personality is susceptible to various influences, in particular to those resulting from human interaction. This insight swept away many of the old scholastic concepts and gained special importance in the fields of pedagogics and psychotherapy. How ever, in the wake of every great discovery we find inherent dangers. For years, various claims and creeds on the malleability of personality have been put forward as if they were proven facts. Lay literature, too, was permeated with wrong and distorted information on factors which might endanger child development.

Middle children are underachievers, overshadowed and overlooked, right? Wrong. Combining research in evolutionary biology, psychology and sociology with real-life stories, psychologist Catherine Salmon, Ph.D., and journalist Katrin Schumann reveal what it really means to grow up in between, including how: • Middles receive less financial and emotional support from their parents, but become remarkably successful and innovative adults • Middles can be stubbornly independent as teens, but are extraordinary team players later in life • Middles are often seen as outcasts, but are actually far less likely to get divorced or be in therapy than their siblings. With surprising insights into how our birth order affects us, as well as constructive advice on how to maximize advantages and overcome drawbacks, The Secret Power of Middle Children shows middleborns at any age (and their parents) how to use what seems to be a disadvantage as a strategy for personal and professional success.