“Set a good example for your sister, Ria. She looks up to you.” These words seem to be built into a recorder on repeat throughout the course of my childhood.

The firstborn and lastborn child of a family each share a different set of stereotypical behaviors. These characteristics remain surprisingly similar across children from all families, yet unique based on the variations in each child’s upbringing.

I come from a typical family that consists of my two parents, my twelve year old sister and I. As an older sister by three years, it is impossible not to compare the rules that my parents set on me to the constraints that they place on my sister.

Psychologists claim that the firstborn will naturally be an experiment for the parents, and as the elder child in my family, I could not agree more. I find that my parents encourage me to participate in a wider variety of activities compared to my younger sister, simply because they do not know which of the opportunities available would be a fit for my personality. After watching me experience everything from cooking classes to drum lessons, they now figure out whether or not my sister would take interest in these pursuits.

Learning from the mistakes they made when I was my sister’s age, one of which involved making me sit through a four hour art class despite my crying protests, my parents now give my sister a more focused approach on her extracurriculars based on her interests.

She developed her skills to an advanced level in only two sports, softball and volleyball, in comparison to the wide range of sports I was forced to try out, including table tennis and golf. With everything my sister participates in, my parents have a pre-acquired knowledge of the ins and outs of the activity due to the the painstaking attention they paid towards me.

The attention is sometimes carried to a whole new level and I find myself wishing that I was the younger child in the family. I find my parents’ so-called “perfectionist” coming out when they seemingly point out every infinitesimal discrepancy in my behavior or work ethic. I often wonder why my sister never seems to have to endure lectures about the most insignificant of matters while I get reprimanded for not arranging my shoes in the correct order on the rack.

Over time I have come to realize that this pattern repeats after sharing experiences with my friends who are also the oldest child in their family. The firstborn tends to achieve more attention, not always the most pleasant kind.

I now appreciate the little things that my parents do for me, knowing that even though there are not-so-great aspects of being the oldest child, I will always be blessed to have an amazing younger sister and a mother and father who care about their daughters’ futures.