Every week it seems like there’s a new study about siblings, like that one that said first-born’s are smarter?
Cue: everyone who isn’t a first born being outraged.
Anyway, this new study is all about the second born.
According to a report from Joseph Doyle, an MIT economist, “the curse of the second born child” is true! It explains how the second born are more likely to misbehave, usually with bad consequences.
The ~troubled~ child.
Enter, Jenny Humphrey (Gossip Girl), Kaitlin Cooper (The O.C.), and any other reference you can think of from pop culture.

Doyle says that second-borns (particularly boys) are more inclined to be rebellious than their older siblings.
The collected data, which looked at thousands of brothers in both the U.S. and Europe, showed that second-born children are 25 to 40 percent more likely to get in serious trouble at school or with the law. Yikes. This seems like a gender thing all of a sudden TBH.
An explanation from NPR suggest that it could all be due to changing parenting techniques after the first child.
“The firstborn has role models, who are adults. And the second, later-born children have role models who are slightly irrational 2-year-olds, you know, their older siblings,” Doyle told NPR.
“Both the parental investments are different, and the sibling influences probably contribute to these differences we see in the labor market and what we find in delinquency. It’s just very difficult to separate those two things because they happen at the same time.”
What do you guys think of this? Are you a second child and are you ~the troublemaker~?