Personally, I love being the younger sibling. Sure, a lot of my clothes are hand-me-downs and every now and then I get the, “Oh you’re that guy’s sister.” While there’s a decent amount of difficulties, there are also some perks that we younger siblings couldn’t live without. Catelyn Nguyen (12), who is the youngest of her siblings, adds that “I actually like being the youngest, but there are a lot of pros and cons to being the younger sibling.”

Difficulties

Let’s state the obvious first. Stereotypes. Yes, we were probably annoying and spoiled as a kid. But just like anyone else, as we’ve grown up, we’ve had to earn things on our own and have transitioned out of our nagging phase. However, it’s not very easy to prove that we’ve grown up. At least to our families, we will always be the babies of the family, which makes it harder to be seen as independent.

In school, both the youngest and middle siblings have probably experienced a teacher recognizing their last name. There is no winning in this situation. If the older sibling was a good student, we’ll be held to higher standards and be expected to do the same. If the older sibling was not the most pleasant, then we have the honor of trying to cleanse the family’s name.

Everyone expects the younger sibling to be a carbon copy of the older sibling if not, a diluted version of them. To make it worse, while other people are comparing us to our siblings, younger siblings often fall into the trap of comparing ourselves. When it comes to how high our GPA is in school, how well we can play the piano, or which Universities we got into, it’s easy to compare ourselves to our siblings as we were both raised the same way. But we weren’t raised the same way. We may have been raised by the same people, but we’re still living different lives.

Advantages

Although, I have to admit. I don’t think I’d be the same person if I were the eldest or an only child. For starters, I have thick skin. From my older brother poking me in the back when I was ten to when he made fun of my outfits when I was thirteen, I can firmly say that I was not an easy victim for bullies in school. Nothing ever said to me by some mean kids in school will ever beat being called a boney goblin. 

Another advantage is that we’re more mature than our friends. When our older siblings were our age, we were able to watch them grow and even get a head start by learning from all of their mistakes. If we ever need advice, it’s good to know that our older siblings will be brutally honest and tell us what we don’t want to but need to hear.

I get why most siblings don’t like the youngest. We randomly interrupted the smooth-sailing flow of our older siblings’ lives. But just like we’ve had plenty of advantages and disadvantages from being the youngest, the other siblings do too. As for only children… they just exist.