The pattern still harms all of them in some ways - e.g. the oldest becomes independent and gets less attention with respect to homework while the middle one still needs help, the youngest requires more help to ride a bike than the middle one did, so you're more likely to just let the middle kid go riding than to halt your whole day for an hour to help little one catch up on the skill, etc.
But when you have limited time and energy to divide amongst your kids, they respond in interesting ways. For instance, one kid is often praised for being good compared to others who are doing something naughty, which means that kid ends up being less labor intensive and requires less of your time. But eventually that well-behaved kid learns to play up the good/naughty contrast in ways that reap a reward. Now the good kid is the one you go to when you need to accomplish certain things, and the kid cooperates in such a way as to ensure this continues. That's great, except it leaves out everyone else, which means they're likely to continue doing things that make them more labor intensive to deal with. One kid learns that negative attention is attention, and then devises various ways of getting that while hopefully also minimizing the negative part of your response. One kid learns that simply refusing to do things until you reach an intolerance point is a good way to get you to engage with them in great detail. I sort of see this dynamic developing and playing out, but it happens in very slow motion and it's very hard to figure out how to counteract the overall tendency, even if you were capable of doing that.Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Mon Nov 28, 2016 12:18 pm
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