Study Proves Parents Tougher on Eldest Children: Playing Hardball Sends a Message to Younger Siblings

If you're an eldest child, you might think you had it harder than your younger brothers and sisters. Maybe your memories of growing up are quite different from theirs. Maybe you're amazed at family gatherings when your younger siblings maintain that Mom and Dad weren't so tough - while you remember screaming matches, groundings and endless unfair punishments. Well, now science is here to back you up. According to a newly published study, parents really are tougher on their firstborn than on subsequent children. And with good reason.

The study was carried out by Lingxin Hao of Johns Hopkins University, V. Joseph Hotz of Duke University, and Ginger Z. Jin of the University of Maryland. They published their findings in a paper titled Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviours, Parental Reputation and Strategic Transfers, which appears in the latest edition of The Economic Journal.

Hao, Hotz and Jin examined parent-child relationships from an economic standpoint that focuses on parents and children engaging in transactions to try and get the outcomes they want. In this model, parents' main method of discouraging their children's bad choices is withholding the "strategic transfers" of the title. This might translate into not paying for college expenses, or not allowing the child to live at home after they turn 18.

Previous work in this area focused on a "reputation model." Success in getting the child to avoid the undesirable choice beforehand, rather than merely punishing them for it afterward, depends on the child believing that the parents really will follow through with the threatened punishment. (Yes, it all sounds a lot like nuclear deterrence.) This can be difficult since withholding resource transfers ultimately harms the child, and that represents failure for the parents.

The researchers cite Gary Becker's "Rotten Kid Theorem." Becker reduced the process to a simple game of two moves. First, the child decides whether to engage in undesirable behavior. Then the parents decide whether to transfer resources to the teenager as a reward, or withhold them as punishment. Becker's mathematical analysis of his game found that parents could positively influence their children's behavior this way. However, other researchers later argued that it didn't have to work out so well - especially if children and parents placed different values on the resources at issue.

Hao, Hotz and Jin expanded the mathematical analysis of Becker's "game" to consider multiple rounds as parents play the game with successive children. Here, parents and children begin to experience the game quite differently. Each child plays through only once, but the parents play each successive round with a different child. Thus, unlike the children, the parents need to consider a long-term strategy. And here's where birth order plays its part. Hao, Hotz and Jin found that, when parents are playing to win in the long term, they actually benefit from punishing the eldest child, even though withholding resources harms the child and lowers their own success as parents.

The reason is that this essentially sends a message to younger children, strengthening the parents' reputation, and making it less likely that they'll need to harm their other children in the same way. In other words, by taking a hit in the first round, parents increase their overall success.

Taking this out of mathematics and examining it from a family's perspective, the oldest child is blazing a new trail. He or she is more likely to run afoul of the parents, and the parents have something to gain from making an example of the child. The younger siblings observe the results of the elder child's behavior and can use that knowledge to shape their own choices - an advantage the eldest child lacks. As a result, they're better able to avoid conflict with their parents and the parents are more likely to get the behavior they want.

Having worked out the math behind this principle, the researchers went looking for evidence of it in the real world. They studied data collected from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79). This is an exhaustive collection of data about more than 12,500 men and women collected by the U.S. Department of Labor. The subjects were initially interviewed in 1979, when they were between 14 and 22 years old. They were re-interviewed annually through 1994, and biannually since then. The Survey has compiled huge amounts of information about these subjects over the years and is a popular source of data for academic researchers.

Hao, Hotz and Jin looked through the data for instances of teenagers either dropping out of school or having children. Both these go well beyond simply staying out past curfew. They're major choices that would impact the child's future, and the sort of thing designed to send parents off the deep end. They compared these with two indicators of subsequent resource transfers after the child turned 18: direct financial transfers that represented more than half the child's income, and whether the child was still living at home.

Based on the NLSY79 data, the researchers examined the percentage of children who were receiving these benefits, and checked how many of them had dropped out or had children against how many had not. They found no difference in co-residence between dropouts and those who finished school. Parents were equally likely to let children live at home after they turned 18, regardless of whether they finished school or not. But they did find that fewer dropouts were receiving financial help while not living at home - 19% of dropouts compared to 24% of non-dropouts. Thus the "penalty" for dropping out is a 5% reduction in the chances that your parents will help you out with living expenses once you've moved out.

Next the researchers separated families with only children from families where younger siblings were present. According to the model, that effect should be stronger for teenagers who have one or more younger siblings "at risk" of making similar choices. (In other words, if there are younger children watching, the parents should be more likely to punish the eldest child to make sure the younger ones get the message.) And the numbers bore this out. In terms of co-residence, having a younger sibling actually revealed a penalty where there hadn't been one before. The reduction in your odds of being allowed to live at home if you drop out goes from 0% to 6% if you have a younger sibling, while the reduction in your chances of getting money from the folks goes from 5% to 8%.

This trend was even more pronounced for daughters who gave birth. There, the "co-residence penalty" jumped from 7% all the way to 19%, while the "financial transfers penalty" went from 15% to 20%.

The overall finding is that parents have powerful incentives for being harder on their first child, and the data shows that they actually do tend to act in accordance with those incentives. The research implies that younger children benefit from the mistakes made by their older brothers and sisters, and are likely to enjoy smoother relationships with their parents and gain more from their parents' largess. Something to bring up at the next family Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps...

To cite this article: Lingxin Hao, V. Joseph Hotz, Ginger Z. Jin (2008) Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviour, Parental Reputation and Strategic Transfers* The Economic Journal 118 (528) , 515-555 doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02132.x