Between Siblings and Beyond: How Age Gaps, Birth Order, and Family Dynamics Shape the Gifted Experience

We’ll look at several different issues here.

Age Spacing and Birth Order

Several other families already discussed had issues with birth order and bullying when the younger child accelerated past the older sibling in school or one of the children bullied another. The following families had not just one sibling as part of the study, but also no other input from the family about the sibling referred to in this section.

Seth Cannon

Seth, whose type preference was INFP (Idealist) as a child and iNTP as an adult, is a highly gifted Level Two and has two brothers who are six and eleven years younger. When the age differences are this large, each child has an entirely different experience because of how their parents’ marriage and careers have likely changed over time.

We all got quite a bit of individual attention. There was no direct competition really. Always pretty fine. The two younger ones still live at home. They have to deal with my parents’ divorce and splitting time between their houses now, and I never did have that to manage or even think about really.